In normal times, Environmental Engineering senior Elieen R. Egolf ’21 would have conducted most of her thesis research at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Active Learning Labs.
But with labs mostly closed due to the pandemic, she took an unusual approach to her research in an unusual location: she built a robot composter in the basement of her home in Colorado.
Sourcing food waste from a local composting facility, Egolf amassed about 89 gallons of material to test her invention and woke up at 6:00 a.m. every other day for six weeks to conduct testing.
On Friday, she and other SEAS seniors celebrated the completion of their undergraduate theses and senior capstone projects, the culmination of a year of research conducted in spite of the logistical hurdles of an unconventional, largely-remote semester at SEAS.