Date Time
High-risk, high-reward research
Four high-risk, high-reward research projects led by Waterloo Engineering professors were awarded a total of $1 million in federal funding this week.
Each of the projects is eligible for up to $250,000 over two years under the New Frontiers in Research Fund 2020 Exploration program, which brings researchers from different disciplines together to pursue breakthrough ideas.
The engineering-led projects at Waterloo – six projects were approved campus-wide – are headed by Nandita Basu of civil and environmental engineering, Boxin Zhao and Luis Ricardez-Sandoval of chemical engineering, and Oliver Schneider of management sciences.
Basu, also a professor of earth and environmental sciences, will investigate the improved use of agricultural waste as both a fertilizer and an input to biogas energy systems, then quantify the impact on water quality and greenhouse gas emissions.
/CNW/ - The New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) 2020 Exploration competition has awarded funds to support 117 research projects across Canada that bring.
Apr. 6, 2021 , 7:01 PM
If you want your work to be highly cited, here’s one simple tip that might help: Steer clear of discipline-specific jargon in the title and abstract. That’s the conclusion of a new study of roughly 20,000 published papers about cave science, a multidisciplinary field that includes researchers who study the biology, geology, paleontology, and anthropology of caves. The most highly cited papers didn’t use any terms specific to cave science in the title and kept jargon to less than 2% of the text in the abstract; jargon-heavy papers were cited far less often.
“I was really, really interested in what the study did,” says Nandita Basu, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo who serves as an editor-in-chief at the
Share
Rain washing off fields can pollute waterways with fertilizer. Wetlands help remove that excess nitrogen. ANT Photo Library/Science Source
Targeting U.S. wetland restoration could make cleaning up water much cheaper
Dec. 18, 2020 , 2:15 PM
Wetlands do a great job of filtering and cleaning up polluted water. But in the United States, many of those natural filters have been destroyed: filled in, paved over, or drained to become farm fields. Now, a study suggests policymakers responsible for managing wetlands could do a better job by strategically locating restored or created wetlands near sources of pollution, such as farms and livestock operations. Such a targeted approach would remove much more nitrogen which pollutes groundwater, lakes, and coastal waters than current scattershot policies, the researchers say.