Category: Energize NM Project

Fifteen students and five faculty researchers from New Mexico Tech, New Mexico Highlands University, and Eastern New Mexico University congregated at the New Mexico Tech Environmental Engineering Laboratory, June 9 – 11 to learn the basics of membrane fabrication and characterization. The first in a series of technical workshops, this three-day intensive workshop was designed to establish and nurture a vibrant research infrastructure in New Mexico for osmotic power development.

Santa Fe Community College (SFCC) has been awarded a $50,000, SEED Infrastructure Grant from the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), for commercial algae photo-bioreactor monitoring. It will fund the purchase of state-of-the-art sensors to monitor algae growth in photobioreactors (PBRs) that are up to 10,000 liters in volume.

Have you ever wondered about what percentage of your life you spend in school? For those of us finishing up the last few weeks of the spring semester-- as a student, teacher or parent-- it probably feels like a huge number. But according to Dr. John Falk, the Sea Grant professor of Free-Choice Learning at Oregon State University, for the average American the answer is less than 5% of your waking hours are spent in school.

José M. Cerrato, a new assistant professor in the UNM Department of Civil Engineering, has a smile that lights up a room when he talks about his work. “I feel blessed to have this job because it is not merely technically teaching a subject,” he says. “It is impacting people’s lives.”

How can a canyon be a Frankenstein Monster? A new theory claims that it is one large canyon formed by pieces of smaller, older canyons. A team of researchers, including three New Mexico EPSCoR participants, developed this new theory regarding the formation of the modern Grand Canyon. Their research states it was carved starting about 5-6 million years ago by the Colorado River through older "paleocanyons." Dr. Karl Karlstrom, Dr. Laura Crossey, and...

The Journal for Contemporary Water Research and Education just released a special issue (Issue 152) dedicated to the Tri-State Interdisciplinary Modeling Class, part of the Western Consortium for Cyberinfrastructure Development grant. The journal includes articles and case studies by Sam Fernald (NMSU), José Rivera (UNM) and Carlos Ochoa (NMSU), all researchers under our previous New Mexico EPSCoR project. Sam Fernald is currently part of our Social & Natural Science Nexus component team.

Geothermal Energy component co-lead Mark Person and his colleagues recently had their research review on groundwater reserves published in Nature. "Offshore fresh groundwater reserves as a global phenomenon," by Person (NMT), Vincent Post (Flinders University), Jacobus Groen (VU University Amsterdam), Henk Kooi (VU University Amsterdam), Shemin Ge (University of Colorado), and W. Mike Edmunds (University of Oxford), was published in Volume 504 of the magazine earlier this month and discusses the large amounts of groundwater found below continental shelves.

The presence of uranium in groundwater is an issue of great public interest in New Mexico. For many areas in the northeast quadrant of the state, the uranium in underground aquifers has made it unusable for animals or humans. It’s not completely clear how much of the problem should be blamed on natural processes and how much has been caused by uranium mining through the later part of the 20th century.

Dr. Peter Lammers, a project lead on the NM EPSCoR bioalgal energy component, and his team at New Mexico State University (NMSU) were recently awarded a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue research on algae-based fuel. The project, entitled "Realization of Algae Potential" or REAP, will last 2.5 years and will focus on improving the yields and stability of algal biomass and cultivation systems.