2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Water Working Group at West Texas A&M University: A creative means for interdisciplinary research catalyzation and faculty development

Presented at Faculty Development Division (FDD) Technical Session 11

[University in Texas] is a Primarily Undergraduate Institution (PUI). The university has historically been focused on pedagogy for K-12 educators and growing a more educated workforce across many disciplines, which is why we have been and still are a PUI with continued focus on undergraduate education. However, beginning in 2021, a group of 10-15 faculty who have grown know to each other in areas of agricultural science, natural science, computer science, engineering, and social science have found it advantageous to make common cause through a scarce natural resource that seems to come up often in education, rural life, business, and policy in our region--water. We have therefore been meeting as faculty researchers who want to grow in research success through something we call the Water Working Group (WWG).

The vision for the WWG is to see “water challenges relevant to the culture, people, and environment of the [region name] be solved in a way which is meaningful both to our current residents and in the long-term, 100-year time horizon.” While this is the public face of WWG, for faculty, this group has served as a strong means of faculty development. This development includes activities such as connecting with area entrepreneurs who might benefit from research consultation and joint projects, sharing ideas about how to broaden education in water beyond our classroom so that the wider [region] culture changes their mindset about water, going on research-oriented group field trips, and preparing grant applications through formal concept papers. In this Work-In-Progress paper, we explain the study design for the near term that will examine how faculty have been impacted in their participation in the form of in-depth individual interviews and a survey. At the time of writing, no direct data has been collected as this data is forthcoming in summer and fall of 2024. Any faculty elsewhere who have struggles in areas of junior faculty mentoring, the balance between research and teaching, and growing interdisciplinary research at your institution may benefit from the lessons we have learned.

Authors

Dr. Nathan Luke Howell West Texas A&M University [biography]

I am an associate professor examining micropollutants in natural water systems: their origins, processes that control their distribution in the environment (air, sediment, soil, and water), and their fate-and-transport and risk to biota and humans. My research includes experimental studies, field measurements, and model development. I am also investigating large deep groundwater aquifer water quality data sets to determine what possible use such water could be to alleviate water stress.
Dr. Kenneth R. Leitch P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3322-779X West Texas A&M University [biography]

Dr. Kenneth R. Leitch holds BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from New Mexico State University and an M.B.A. from Colorado Christian University. He is an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering in the College of Engineering at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas and is a registered professional engineer by examination in Texas and Indiana. He is active in the structural, transportation, construction materials, and sustainability subjects of the civil engineering discipline and in engineering education.
Dr. Anirban Pal West Texas A&M University [biography]

Dr. Anirban Pal received his B. Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (2010) and his Ph. D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2016), both in Mechanical Engineering. He worked as Post-Doctoral Research Associate for 1.5 years and as a Lecturer for 6 months at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute prior to joining the College of Engineering at West Texas A&M in Fall 2019 as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

The famous American scientist Richard Feynman prophesied the huge potential for engineering at small scales (There’s plenty of room at the bottom!). In this spirit, Dr. Pal is interested in the unique nano-mechanical behavior of materials at small scales, and how they can be harnessed to produce desired behavior at larger macroscopic scales.

His research interests include energetic molecular crystals, fiber networks, mechanical and thermal metamaterials. Using computational tools such as molecular dynamics, density functional theory, graph theory and finite elements, he has published work in Physical Review Letters, Scientific Reports, Physical Review E, and Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering. A list of his publications can be found under ORC id 0000-0002-0466-0589.

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