INTERACTIONS BETWEEN EARTH MATERIALS AND ANTHROPOGENIC CONTAMINANTS – CLASS PROJECTS LEADING TO STUDENTS’ SUCCESS IN RESEARCH AND LEARNING

The class Aqueous and Contaminant Geochemistry (GEOS 431) at the University of Wisconsin – Parkside (UWP) was designed to engage students to gain research experiences that lead to peer-reviewed journal publications and practical experience that are ready to be deployed in private industry. As UWP is a satellite campus of University of Wisconsin System and small in size, the department has three faculty members and about 20 majors. Thus, the class is taught every other year. Earth materials are vast in reserves, large in specific surface area, and high in cation exchange capacity. As such, they were studied extensively for the removal of emergent contaminants from water over the last 30 years. For the research projects, the objectives need to be clear, the experiments should be done in a timely manner, and analyses to be conducted utilizing the available instruments on campus. The projects were focused on using Earth materials, such as clay minerals and zeolites without or with surface modification, to remove natural and anthropogenic contaminants from water. The emerging contaminants includes pharmaceuticals and personal care products, color dyes, arsenic, and chromium. The students were divided into groups. They were responsible for conducting experiments for contaminant removal under different physical and chemical conditions, and were trained for instrumental analyses such as Gas Chromatography, High Performance Liquid Chromatography, Inductively Coupled Plasm, X-ray Diffractions, Infrared, Thermal Analyses, Total Organic Carbon determination, and Fluorescence measurements in the SC Johnson Analytic Lab of UWP. The engagement in student research resulted in more than 40 peer-reviewed journal publications with student co-authors. In addition, 5 students received Outstanding Graduate Awards and 2 received Chancellor’s Awards upon graduation. In addition, the instructor received the Research and Creative Activity Awards twice and the Stella Gray Teaching Excellence Award. The results suggest that engaging students in real-world research will benefit the students and the instructor as well, thus, should be adopted in modern upper division classes with a lab component.