Environmental Engineering Recap (Week 4)

As students learn more about the forces, both natural and artificial, that shape the world, so too do they progress into their own research projects. For this week, students learned about oceans, which is one of Dr. Maha’s favorite topics in Environmental Engineering. Specifically, students learned about physical oceanography (patters of ocean circulation, fluid motion, temperature, and salinity), chemical oceanography (regional chemistry of seawater and exchange of material and gasses), and biological oceanography (responses of marine plankton, ecosystem impacts of the ocean food change), as well as how the three interact with one another to shape and regulate our world’s oceans.

With the students now writing their first drafts of their research papers, Dr. Maha also took extra time to emphasize the importance of maintaining ethical research integrity, not only for the current research papers, but also any academic work that the students choose to pursue in the future. Dr. Maha covered some ways in which the students could maintain high levels of ethical research, and also had the students formulate their own norms of conduct to ensure that their work and their methods were of high ethical standing.