Alumni Magazine - Fall 2008 - (Page 61) Oceanliterate Engineers By Leslie Overman In late September, several Georgia Tech graduate students boarded a boat and set out for a two-day cruise off the coast of Georgia. But this was no fall break excursion — it was a class assignment. Accompanied by their professors and the ship’s five-man crew, the students familiarized themselves with the 92-foot R/V Savannah and its instrumentation and collected water samples and oceanographic data. It was the first of two cruises the students will be taking this semester. The students are enrolled in the first course of a new graduate program in coastal science and engineering being offered by Georgia Tech Savannah and the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, a multidisciplinary research institution within the University System of Georgia and located on Skidaway Island in Savannah. Combining research-based marine science with engineering concepts, the joint program will prepare students to tackle some of the problems that have arisen along the coastline as a result of climate change and a rapidly increasing coastal population. “There’s a region where engineering and oceanography overlap,” says Paul Work, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and an associate director of Georgia Tech Savannah. “There are a lot of problems that require expertise from both of these disciplines.” Students in the program may investigate a number of issues, including beach erosion, pollutant transport, transformation driven by water or sediment movement and invasive species and sensors to monitor those issues. They may also explore ocean-energy extraction. Jay Brandes, a chemical oceanographer with the Skidaway Institute, who, along with Work, now is teaching the first course in the program, says, the two institutes are joining forces “to educate a new generation of what you can think of as ocean-literate engineers. We’re not trying to educate oceanographers in engineering. We’re trying to educate engineers in oceanography.” Funded by the National Science Foundation, the program leads to master’s or doctoral degrees from Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering but is open to students working toward other degrees. The program is the first of its kind to be offered in the Southeast and one of only a few in the country. Nine students, including two at Tech’s Atlanta campus, now are enrolled in the first course. Students are working in teams to collect and interpret data for research projects. “There’s a variety of questions they can tackle. It’ll be up to them,” Brandes says. Whether graduates of the program pursue careers as researchers or professors or join consulting firms to work in specialized fields, Work says there is a need for this multidisciplinary expertise. “A lot of our coastal areas were developed very early in the history of our country, and we have had a bad habit of treating the ocean as a dumping ground, polluting water bodies and sediments, and there’s a lot of cleanup still left to be done,” Work says. Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Fall 2008 61
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