CAMPUS CURRENT
Reclaiming Water CLAREMONT COLLEGES COULD SAVE MILLIONS
Undergraduate research at Harvey Mudd College has helped The Claremont Colleges secure $250,000 to study the feasibility of building a micro-water-recycling facility. The money will fund an engineering study and a one-year
business case to assess the construction and operating costs of a micro-water-treatment plant that would allow the colleges to capture, store and re-use wastewater for landscaping needs. The California Water Foundation awarded half of the funds, and the Claremont University Consortium will provide the remainder. Funding and approval for the study was based upon recom-
mendations from the research project, “Irrigating The Clare- mont Colleges with Reclaimed Water,” conducted by Dustin Zubke ’13. “Funding was a big hurdle for the engineering study. Even
though the water reclamation system seemed very appealing, commissioning the study was still expensive,” Zubke said. “Receiving the grant from the California Water Foundation boosted the engineering study from a good idea to a no-brainer.” Zubke worked with physics Professor Richard Haskell,
director of HMC’s Center for Environmental Studies and did the bulk of his research in the summer of 2011. Supported by a research award from the center, he did a cost-benefi t analysis for a proposed water reclamation system that would reclaim the 5-C’s wastewater. His analysis showed that if a reclamation plant captured and treated the 310,000 gallons of wastewater the colleges generate daily, it could supply 72 percent of the campuses’ landscape water needs. When combined with the ap- propriate landscaping, it could meet 100 percent of the need. Zubke’s project was the latest in a series of studies by stu-
dents, faculty and facilities staff dating back to 2007. In 2009, Sustainable Claremont, a local nonprofi t, extended the study to the Claremont community and drew input from area water and sanitation representatives. Among them was Richard Atwater, executive director of the Southern California Water Committee. “When the California Water Foundation was established,
Rich [Atwater] was asked to head the grants program for water reclamation,” said Haskell. “He immediately thought of our proposed water reclamation project at the colleges, and we were delighted to express interest in the CWF grant program.” Haskell, Zubke and Tim Morrison, CUC vice-president of
facilities management and planning, drafted and submitted a grant proposal requesting funding for the feasibility study. According to Zubke’s fi ndings, the facility could pay for itself
within 12 years and, depending on future water rate increases, save the colleges up to $28 million over 20 years.
16 Har vey Mudd College SPRING 2013
Student Research
Course description: Introduces fundamental concepts from the Core course Computer Science 5 using biology as the context for those computational ideas. Students see connections between disciplines and write computer programs to explore biological phenomena. Biology topics include biochemistry basics, popula- tion genetics, molecular evolution, metabolism and phylogenetics. Computer science material includes basic data types and control structures, dynamic programming and an introduction to automata and computability.
Assignments/Activities: Students write a gene fi nder for their fi rst major project. Other assignments include implementing algo- rithms for alignment, phylogenetic reconstruction and RNA folding, as well as building models of population genetics and evolution.
Faculty says: “Computation has become an invaluable tool in biology, and many new discoveries are being made using com- putational methods. It’s wonderful to demonstrate these ideas to fi rst-year students and to provide them with tools to make their own discoveries. Eliot and I learn from one another, and I think the students can see that we enjoy interacting with one another and with them.” –Ran Libeskind-Hadas, R. Michael Shanahan Profes- sor of Computer Science
Student says: “The material is very exciting and relevant. Computation has become an invaluable tool in biology and many new discoveries are being made using computational methods.” –Suzy Beeler ’15
Only at Mudd: “I think the biology really gets into the bones of the material a lot more than it would in a typical computer science course. That’s possible because HMC is such a small place, and we can devote a lot of time and have many interactions. The creativity that results would be harder to achieve at other places, especially bigger institutions.” –Eliot Bush, assistant professor of biology
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