The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering later this month will open up the recently renovated Environmental Sustainability Laboratory (ESL) in Anderson Hall to engineering students and faculty.
The new lab, constructed over a five-month period, contains multiple improvements that will foster collaborative learning and research, according to Professor and Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering Kurt Pennell.
"The idea is to have more interdisciplinary interaction among students and faculty," he said.
After submitting a proposal in 2009, the department received a $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the lab's infrastructure, Pennell explained.
"A new lab was needed because the old one was out of date," Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering John Durant said. "Its design wasn't conducive to collaborative research and teaching activities."
The 3000-square-foot ESL now boasts an open floor plan so that different groups of faculty members and students can work in the same area, Pennell said.
Durant added that the research space and the teaching spaces in the lab are adjacent to one another, and are intended to promote the flow of information, materials and ideas.
"That's a unique feature which will allow us to explore some neat avenues for better training our students," he said.
Equipment in the lab has been refurbished in order to enhance the quality of the facility, Pennell said, adding that an updated air handling system as well as six ventilating fume hoods will enable students to perform experiments involving toxic substances.
"Students will be able to do different types of experiments that they couldn't do before," he said.
Other state-of-the-art features include two temperature control rooms, a biological safety cabinet for storing biological samples, a microscope room and an emergency generator to provide backup power during experiments, according to Pennell.
"The pieces of equipment that the students will see are much more sophisticated," he said.
A variety of undergraduate environmental engineering courses will take place in the teaching lab section of the ESL, Durant said.
With all the advanced equipment available, he explained, students will gain practical, hands-on experience in setting up environmental engineering processes and measuring chemical reactions.
Pennell anticipates that the new lab will enable students to conduct air quality studies.
"The students will be exposed to more air pollution studies than in the past," he said. "A lot of the time they could only do water-type studies in the old lab."
In addition, the ESL will offer faculty members, graduate students and undergraduate students a spacious venue in which they can conduct multidisciplinary research, Durant said.
"We're going to have at least three investigators at a time sharing the space and sharing the instrumentation," he said.
Pennell noted that students working on their senior theses or on research projects for the Tufts Summer Scholars Program can collaborate with faculty members in the ESL.
"There are going to be projects related to air pollution, groundwater remediation and environmental health," he added.
Doug Walker, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says that his research on environmental contaminants and pesticides will greatly benefit from the improvements made to the ESL.
"Having everything that we need readily available to us in a single lab is going to make us much more efficient and able to complete our research," he said.
Although the department must still secure a series of lab safety approvals from the NSF and the Board of Trustees, Pennell explained that the ESL will be ready for use before the end of month.
"I'm very excited to start working in there soon," Walker said.
—Stephanie Haven contributed reporting to this article.
