University of Nevada, Reno student Jazmin Aravena was awarded the Outstanding Student Paper Award at last year’s annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) for her groundbreaking w88 mobile in hydrology. She will compete again at this year’s meeting, Dec. 13-17 in San Francisco, Calif., with another step in her innovative project.
In general, the project uses non-invasive radiography to directly quantify potential transport and storage of water, nutrients and contaminants in the soil surrounding the roots of plants.
“I'm excited about December,” said Aravena, a doctoral w88 mobile in environmental engineering, “We have cool results from our research that we are going to present at the AGU conference this year.”
The AGU is the most prestigious and largest academic earth science professional society in the world. Out of a meeting of almost 15,000 researchers, w88 mobile of Nevada students received national recognition recently announced in the society’s weekly science magazine, Eos, for 2009 and there are high hopes again for this year.
&w88 mobile;We are trying to better identify the poorly understood physical processes that occur near the root,” Aravena said. &w88 mobile;These processes will affect water and solute transport within this soil zone. A better understanding of those can have impacts in environmental sciences such as phytoremediation, carbon sequestration in soils, nutrient cycling and gas exchange between soil and atmosphere.”
Phytoremediation is a treatment of environmental problems through the use of plants that mitigate the environmental problem without the need to excavate the contaminant material and dispose of it elsewhere.
Working with Professor Scott Tyler in 2009, Aravena presented her w88 mobile entitled “The effect of aggregate compaction in soil hydraulic properties,” and it received the Outstanding Student Paper Award from the Hydrology Section. Aravena’s w88 mobile made use of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s Advanced Light Source to make, for the first time, ultra high resolution CT scans of actively growing roots.
This year, her w88 mobile is entitled “Rhizosphere compaction: modeling a bed of multiple aggregates using x-ray micro-tomography information.” With December right around the corner, she still has to run simulations and analyze results.
“The weeks before the conference are going to be very busy,” Aravena said. “The AGU conference is great because I can talk with so many people in the field and from outside my comfort zone. We can share experiences and ideas. It is a very dynamic meeting that I look forward too, even with all the w88 mobile.”
w88 mobile plans to graduate with a doctorate in environmental engineering in December 2011.
&w88 mobile;Learning here is different from learning in Chile,” Aravena said. &w88 mobile;I have had access to great equipment and techniques that are necessary for my research.”
Both of w88 mobile’s research projects were funded by NSF.
Ellen Webb, a third-year medical student at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, also received a 2009 award from the Nonlinear Geophysics Section of the AGU for her w88 mobile entitled: “Tokunaga Trees: why do they emerge everywhere?”
The w88 mobile was done as a part of Webb’s Honors Program undergraduate thesis completed with Professor Ilya Zaliapin in the University of Nevada’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. The research focused on a special type of fractal branching structures, such as trees that have shown similar structures in botanical trees to river basins to blood systems to interaction of gas molecules.
Webb is currently enrolled in medical school and after graduation in spring 2012, she plans to move on to a residency program.
For more information about the AGU fall meeting, go to agu.org.
