Southwestern University
AC-10: Support for Sustainability Research

The King Creativity Fund annually supports “innovative and visionary projects” of enrolled students, supporting multiple projects every academic year with grants ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

In 2019-2020, the project "Using AI to Sort Recycled Materials" worked on improving artificial intelligence to sort recycled materials using a camera. The goal of the project was to have an efficient method of sorting the recycled material as well as material that is contaminated and not able to be recycled.

In 2018-2019, the project ""San Gabriel River Research"" focused on the controversy surrounding the new Liberty Hill Wastewater Treatment Facility. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has documented several violations regarding the facility's discharge of effluent into the river, and residents speculate that this contamination is to blame for concerning changes in the river's overall appearance. The student-led team collected water quality data from a total of five locations, for two consecutive seasons. At each site, nitrate concentration, phosphate concentration, and dissolved oxygen concentration were recorded. Most importantly, samples of fecal coliform bacteria and aquatic macroinvertebrates were collected from each site and counted/identified, as macroinvertebrates are significant bio-indicators of water quality.

Another 2018-2019 project "Ocean Energy Conversion: Electrical Energy Conversion and Desalination" wanted to address the critical issue of renewable energy with a solution that would effectively and efficiently generate usable energy. For the project, the team wanted to choose the most available and untapped source: ocean water. Winds driven by weather phenomena produce waves and rising and falling wave action produces an almost constant reciprocating kinetic force that can be tapped by shore installations throughout most of the world. The goal was to create a self-sustaining pier, drawing energy from the ocean and converting it into electrical energy, while using Reverse Osmosis technology to create freshwater. Data was taken to include the amount of energy produced scaled to a larger life-size mode, quality of clean water, the project's economic applicability with a projected business model, and biochemical analysis of changeable variables to greater enhance the longevity of the system in an oceanic environment.

SCOPE is a student-faculty collaborative summer research program that aims to foster a culture of research, support ongoing faculty development, and promote student investigative learning, persistence, and success.

One recent SCOPE Project that focuses on sustainability is Dr. Romi Burks' "Much Closer to home: Surveying for apple snails in San Antonio" using eDNA. The proposal seeks funding to support continued research into a novel detection tool designed to detect invasive species, the apple snails. During the 2018 and 2019 programs, pairs of SCOPE students worked to optimize the species-specific detection of apple snails. They have successful detections from the field. However, due to the length of the environmental DNA "amplicon" that we can amplify machine, they have not been able to confirm the precise identity with sequencing. Consequently, we recently designed new primers to make a longer amplicon that can then be sequenced to determine its validity. The recent discovery of apple snails provides a perfect opportunity for fieldwork and testing new primers. The utilization of the eDNA backpack to standardize sample collection will help to complete the analysis of those samples with the Molecular Biology lab at Southwestern.

Paideia—Southwestern’s interdisciplinary approach to education—is designed to develop the intellectual practice of identifying connections between the fundamental questions and ideas that shape our world.

Faculty participation in an interdisciplinary program involves curricular demand outside of those in the faculty member’s own department. In evaluating faculty for the purposes of awarding tenure, promotion, or salary increases, effective teaching in an interdisciplinary course and participation in Paideia are recognized and valued as involving these special demands.

The library subscribes to a sustainability database provided by JSTOR with a large number of articles and books in the collection that address the topic. The library only provides research guides for individual classes upon request.