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What if you could give millions of people access to safe drinking water and help solve the climate crisis at the same time? As a bonus, you could help your own community prepare for when the Big One comes.

That’s the vision behind a personal-sized water treatment appliance now in development by a team led by two Oregon State engineering alumni.

“For most people around the world, water out of the tap has to be treated, not optionally for better taste but to make it safe to drink,” said Paul Berg, B.S. civil engineering ’78.

Two engineering graduate students at Oregon State University and one recent alum have been selected as fellows in the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Oskar Zehren and his classmates will be the first-ever Oregon State University students to earn a bachelor’s degree in outdoor products when they graduate this spring. 

Based at Oregon State University-Cascades in Bend, the interdisciplinary outdoor products degree program, introduced in 2019, has given Zehren the knowledge to navigate all stages of outdoor product development, including conceptualization, design, manufacturing, and marketing.

Yue Cao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Energy Systems research group, has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The award includes a grant of nearly $500,000 over five years.

Lucia Gómez Hurtado, now a fourth-year nuclear engineering student, remembers when her father was a graduate student. 

“I used to stop by his office and see what he was doing,” she said. “I would sit next to him and look at equations on his computer screen that made no sense to me. He showed me CAD designs and I would ask lots of questions.”

In a way, Sanjida Yeasmin is pursuing her PhD in electrical and computer engineering not just for herself, but for countless others as well.

“I’m trying to bring electronics to the medical field to save lives or make lives better. This always drives me,” she said.

As an undergraduate student in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University, Bradley Heenk and his fellow students often printed 3D parts to use in their class projects. Since many students needed custom-printed parts at the same time, Heenk saw this as opportunity to start a business and help his classmates get quality parts more quickly.

Barbara Simpson, assistant professor of structural engineering, has received a Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, award from the National Science Foundation. The award includes a grant of nearly $600,000 over five years. 

Clotilde Pierson joined the faculty of the architectural engineering program at Oregon State University as a 

Since she began studying materials science as a graduate student at Oregon State University in 2015, Kenya Hazell, a GEM Fellow and recent environmental technology researcher and development intern at Corning, has sought to discover ways to sustainably create and apply polymer composites — unique materials with synergistic properties, formed by combining reinforcement materials with polymer matrices.