research

Madalyn Gragg, an undergraduate in mechanical engineering and general physics, is one of three students at Oregon State University chosen to receive the 2024 Barry Goldwater Scholarship, a national award established in 1986 in memory of Sen. Barry Goldwater.

In her scholarship application essay, Gragg reflected on the challenges she faced in getting into college coming from a school designated under Title I-A as a school that serves children from families experiencing poverty.

Elise Cordle’s senior year at South Albany High School ended abruptly (and three months early) with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Classes were canceled; graduation celebrations were postponed. But that didn’t thwart Cordle’s ambition to be the first in her family to attend college.

“College is something that was always talked about in my family,” Cordle said. “My parents would have attended if they’d had the opportunity, and it was something they really wanted for me.”

When asked why she has focused her career on water, Meghna Babbar-Sebens has a simple answer: “Water is life.”

Clean water is precious in India, where she grew up. According to a recent report by the World Bank, India contains 18% of the world’s population, but just 4% of the world’s water resources.

Careful consideration of solar power placement on agricultural land can improve yield, reduce water use, generate more electricity, and make room for grazing animals.

Photos courtesy of Chad Higgins.

Water, energy, and agriculture form the bedrock of civilization. While many technologies have advanced these components separately, few have aimed to address all three simultaneously.

Oregon State University’s new maps of 30-year U.S. climate “normals” show the area east of the Rockies is getting wetter, the Southwest is getting drier, and temperatures are inching upward – with daily lows rising faster than daily highs.

“When we publish the new normals every 10 years, we’re taking away one decade from a 30- year period and adding another, which means the changes we see are subtle,” said Chris Daly, professor of geospatial climatology and the founding director of Oregon State’s PRISM Climate Group.

Graduate student Courtney Beringer makes adjustments to LUPA, a prototype wave energy converter tested at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab.

Photos by Johanna Carson and Chance Saechao.

What images pop up when you hear someone mention wind power and solar power? It’s a safe bet you’ll picture towering three bladed turbines, photovoltaic panels, or perhaps vast mirror arrays. But what do you see when you imagine the machinery used to harvest wave energy?

Photos by Johanna Carson.

The Oregon Bioengineering Symposium — jointly organized by Oregon State, Oregon Health & Science University, and the University of Oregon — was established in 2019 to promote collaboration and exchange of ideas between students, researchers and practitioners in Oregon and the surrounding region. This year the meeting will take place on Oct. 6 at the LaSells Stewart Center at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon. There will also be a virtual poster session on Oct. 5.

Amy Glen loves skiing, so much that it factored into her decision to attend the University of Vermont, where the Alaska native majored in biology and competed with the university’s ski team.

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree, Glen worked at a lab that conducted analytical chemistry studies for pharmaceutical companies, where she worked with a lot of Excel spreadsheets. She realized that automating the manual data entry tasks would help her become more efficient in her job, but she didn’t have any programming background.

Paris Myers’ time at Oregon State University took the shape of a collage with a bit of everything in the mix.