“We’re looking for the rate at which soil is deposited over time. We take sediment cores from the soil, dissect them, analyze them, and then determine the impact people have had on the land.”
What Jessie Demoise, a junior in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, is talking about is the research she is doing with graduate student Priscilla Delano and Professor Grace Brush.
“When I joined the department, I was immediately invited to work with graduate students and was in the lab doing research,” she remarks. “I love that the department is small. We pile into a van and drive all over Maryland looking at fire ecosystems, wetlands, and other natural habitats. And Baltimore is the perfect place to study environmental engineering. Here we have the Bay and different sites like water pumping stations, industrial areas, and diverse natural ecosystems.”
Other research outings have included visits to the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, back-river water treatment plants, area landfills, hazardous waste sites, and the Catoctin Mountains in western Maryland where Demoise studied the devastating effect the hemlock wooly adelgid caterpillar has had on hemlock trees.
“Environmental engineering is so practical. In the same way doctors save people’s lives,” Demoise says, “we are preventing people from getting sick by solving environmental problems.