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CEE senior Josclyn Harrington is president of the Duke chapter of the American Society for Civil Engineering, the Chi Epsilon engineering honor society and a member of the Society of Women Engineers. In her junior year, she spent a semester abroad in Paris where she studied French, lived with a host family and had the opportunity to travel to Prague, Madrid, Brussels and Rome. Now a senior, she will lead the student club in its annual concrete canoe race and steel bridge competition at the Carolinas Conference. The annual conference gives students fun opportunities to test out both their technical and communications skills.

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Associate Professor of the Practice Joseph Nadeau has upgraded the mechanics lab to expand hands-on laboratory capabilities for a whole range of structural mechanics courses including EGR75L Mechanics of Solids, CE131L Matrix Structural Design and CE134L Metallic Structures. The upgrade features a new bench-mountedTQ’s Structures Test frame and six experimental modules, including additional hardware and software. This lab upgrade moves the student experience from simple testing and theoretical work into hands-on exploration of stress, strain, deflections, buckling, bending, and torsion on engineered systems. The experimental system allows students to virtually model a structure and then compare that theory to the actual behavior of the structure under stress.

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In an effort to raise awareness about dangerous levels of nitrates that are making their way from pineapple fields into the water supplies of villagers in the West African nation of Ghana, CEE Professor Fred Boadu enlisted Pratt undergraduate Natalia Rossiter-Thornton, a senior CEE major, to spend three weeks in Ghana last summer. Nitrates can lead to the death of infants and cause cancer in adults. They traveled to two villages informing people about the contamination of their water supply and gathering information about their farming practices. Boadu uncovered the problem while mapping the geology in Ghana, his home country.

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In 2007, Duke EWB sent Lee Pearson and sophomore Maggie Hoff to Peru to work with Lindsay Dubbs from the EWB chapter at UNC-Chapel Hill on a water project in Ciudad de Dios. Ciudad de Dios, a small squatter village, can only provide half its population with running water due to geographical constraints. While the Peru team was at the village, they conducted a site assessment, using a GPS plotter to make a map of the pipes and taps in the village, installing a flow meter at the main pipeline, and choosing a site for a water reservoir at the top of the village.