Graduate Education

Transcript for Mayara Rocha

My name is Mayara Rocha. I am a fifth year PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy. I grew up in a city called Itaguai. It's in the state of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. It’s a very pretty area. It's surrounded by the mountains and by the sea. I really liked growing up there. My dad, he moved to the city Itaguai to study agronomy. But he ended up leaving college, and he became a fisherman instead. So I joke that I kind of continue with his dream to becoming an agronomist. I did my undergrad at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, and during my undergrad was where I had my first contact with research. And it was really nice having this experience. I had my own project. And then I thought, wait, that's really nice thing to do. I really want to work with research. When I finished my masters, I heard about the opportunity. It was a partnership between Purdue University and the Brazilian government. They were offering PhDs. So I applied, and now I'm here. I work with Kura Clover. Kura Clover. It's a perennial legume, and we are using it as living mulch intercropped with corn. So we are trying this different cropping system. It's a ten acre area. We have 48 plots and every plot has drainage like meter that we can collect all the water. And we also have in each plot chambers that we can collect greenhouse gas emission. So we do this every year from April to December. Because of this facility, we can quantify how much nitrogen we lose by nitrate leaching and also by nitrogen nitrification. So as we know nitrogen is one of the most important nutrients. And there are three main pathways that we can lose nitrogen. So nitrate leaching through the water, we have the nitrification that we have the N2O, the nitrous oxide going to the atmosphere, which is a very harmful greenhouse gas. The main goal of my research is to do a nitrogen balance of this cropping system, and see how we can better manage it to have all the benefits from the kura clover, and also without interfering the crop yields. As an agronomist, I think we have the responsibility to leave a better future for the next generation.

Transcript for Caroline Alukkal

My name is Caroline Alukkal. I'm working as a postdoctoral researcher at Linda S Lee lab. My research is with a class of compounds called PFAs per and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Something that everybody will know is Teflon, which is the cookware coating that we generally heard of. But there are a lot of other compounds in that category. There are more than 10,000 of them in the environment so far we have discovered. My research focuses on developing methods to analyze them so that we can accurately use them for our further research. We consume a lot of biota, like beef, fish. And many parts of them can actually have a lot of PFAs accumulated in them. So if we are not accurately quantifying them, we don't know how much we get into our body. So it's important that we know accurately what's the total PFAs in them so that we can take the next steps. Being postdoc at Purdue is something I will cherish for my lifetime. Mostly because of my lab group. From my childhood, I was a person who wanted to help environment to get better. There are a lot of things that I did like from planting trees in my backyard to helping people be aware that plastic is not good. That's how I got interested with, this part of the research with PFAS.

Transcript for Lynda Peter

I'm Linda Peter. I'm a graduate student in the Department of Agronomy. I'm from Nigeria, I grew up in a coastal, environment, and water quality is the big issue for us back home. I am interested in understanding how a certain group of chemicals known as PFAS, how they behave in the environment, and how this behavior might shape our exposure to these chemicals. PFAS are called forever chemicals. We have had a lot of research pointing to the fact that these chemicals are toxic. I am specifically concerned with the use of biosolids. Otherwise, some people call it sewage sludge, as organic fertilizers. These chemicals are present in biosolids, so once they are applied in agricultural land, there is a potential of them running off or leaching from application source to groundwater or surface water. It's important to sample streams that might be impacted, and then we can thoroughly understand the sources and how things are happening around the environment. When we get to samples we have to extract the samples. So we can analyze for PFAS. And this is a process we call solid phase extraction. We need to go through the steps so we can detect these compounds using our analytical tools. We do not fully understand the risk as of now. So, we need to first of all understand what the mechanisms are before we start thinking of developing technologies to limit or mitigate our risk. I feel a sense of urgency and, just grateful to be part of the team that is doing work that would help forge or help shape how we are managing these chemicals and maybe similar chemicals like this in the future.

Transcript for Jhacolby Williams

My name is Jhacolby Williams. I'm a Master's student in Department of Agronomy. I studied environmental science at Alcorn State University. I was actually the first in my family to pursue a scientific background. I was able to get really expansive understanding of soil science and agriculture in general. Soil health is important because anything that you can really think of, depends on soil health. Especially with farming. When I was younger, what really attracted me to the science was I really wanted a dog. And my mom, did not like animals, so I decided to start growing houseplants. And my passion for growing things in general just took off from there. But I did get a dog. So what I'm studying right now is this probe. This is an NC2 to probe, which means that is evaluating, soil dynamics most probes can only measure one soil dynamic. But what makes this whole probe different is that it can do all of it, and it can do it in multiple depths. My research is to study the efficiency and the accuracy of this one probe. I think personally that this would revolutionize agriculture. It'll save farmers a lot of money. And it also allowed them to better manage their soils. So we're running different trials for each different, soil dynamic that we can measure. So one of them would be nitrate, then phosphorus, carbon dioxide pH, So we're doing this in the lab I think we all play a roles in some point of ensuring that future generations are able to have food on the table while also having sustainable practices. So I'm very grateful. I'm grateful to be, working in the same labs and also so, you know, potentially have a greater impact in the world.