Mid-Atlantic group meets for lunch

The CONSERVE Mid-Atlantic group met for a joint lunch at the University of Maryland in College Park on November 3. In addition to our local group from UMD and USDA, team members came from University of Delaware, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and University of Maryland, Baltimore. Everyone met new colleagues and the lunch was followed up by a group training for the Lab Information Management Software System (LIMS).

Rita Colwell awarded the 7th Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) Creativity Award

Rita Colwell, a Distinguished University of Maryland Professor and CONSERVE collaborator, was awarded the 7th Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) Creativity Award on November 2, 2016 in a ceremony at United Nations Headquarters in New York.

The PSIPW award, considered one of the most prestigious international awards focusing on water-related scientific innovation, recognizes the collaborative research by Rita and Shafiqul Islam from Tufts University that employs chlorophyll information from satellite data to predict cholera outbreaks at least three to six months in advance.

Dr. Colwell is one of the world’s leading researchers of cholera—a waterborne disease estimated by the World Health Organization to strike three to five million people annually, many of them young children.

In 1960, Rita became the first scientist to write a computer program that could identify bacteria. By the 1970s, her groundbreaking use of computational tools to study biology helped establish the field of Bioinformatics, a key area of scientific study today.
 

University of Delaware team at the USDA Farmers Market down in Washington DC

The CONSERVE team at the University of Delaware’s Center for Experimental and Applied Economics (CEAE) rolled out its innovative tuk tuk at the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farmers Market on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Sept. 30, conducting a study on consumers’ preferences for food produced with non-traditional irrigation water.

The Team's Tuk Tuk is a mobile lab with the appearance similar to that of a Thailand food truck and helps attract subjects of all demographics, making it a great tool for research in that it brings in a wide variety of participants. During Friday’s event, about 150 people participated in the experiment.

CONSERVE’s Mid-Atlantic Sampling efforts

Sampling efforts for CONSERVE’s Mid-Atlantic team have begun! In mid-September, we packed up our water pumps and rubber boots and piled into vans for our first sampling trip. We collected water samples from rivers, ponds, and wastewater treatment facilities. Several labs from the CONSERVE team spent the rest of the week processing samples, examining the microbiological, chemical, and physical quality of these diverse water sources. The hard work and planning of the CONSERVE team paid off, and our first sampling and processing days went smoothly. 

Last week, 3 vans full of CONSERVE scientists from 4 different research groups went back out to the Maryland sites with updated protocols and optimized sampling supplies. Our second sampling trip went even better than the first, and data continues to roll in from the first two sample collection days. Our sampling dates are scheduled through December.

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