Renovation of the Environmental Engineering and Sciences Research Laboratories

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NSF and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign will jointly fund the renovation of the Environmental Engineering and Science Research Laboratories of the Department of Civil Engineering. The facilities are located on the fourth floor of the Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory which was built in 1967. The original space was designed as traditional chemistry laboratories for use in water quality research. However, current and proposed research activities in the Environmental Laboratories have changed substantially over the past 28 years, and the existing facilities have become completely inadequate to address increasingly stringent regulations for drinking water, wastewater and solid waste, efficient, low-cost clean up strategies for hazardous waste spills and dumps, and aerosol science and air resources engineering. Renovation activity will focus on the enhancement of the HVAC and systems, and facilities for safe handling of hazardous materials. Temperature, particle, and humidity control are necessary for delicate electronic instrumentation, carefully controlled experiments and sample analysis. Many areas of environmental research have not been pursued, because facilities were not available to safely handle hazardous materials. Space reconfiguration and the addition of fume hoods and solvent storage will address this need. In addition, installation of an enhanced system for inter-laboratory data communications and re-design and improvement of bench configurations and casework will be important work undertaken with NSF support. The renovated facility will be a significant asset to research and research training efforts in four main areas: environmental microbiology and biological process engineering; physical/chemical treatment processes; aerosol science and air resources engineering; and biological monitoring and environmental resource management. The new facilities will aid researchers in the development of an in-house capability to apply molecular biology techniques to water quality control research, preparation of field studies and sample analysis, and for the safe and efficient handling of organic compounds and environmental pathogens. The beneficiaries of the project include 9 faculty, 50 masters and 25 Ph.D. students. Twenty percent of the graduate students are women, and 5% are Black or Hispanic. Wishing to encourage participation by a greater number of under-represented minorities in the Ph.D. program, the college has developed an effort to recruit and retain an increased number of these students.