ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: Kimberly Jones
OUT OF THIS WORLD: KIMBERLY
JONES HOPES HER RESEARCH MAY SOME DAY HELP TO MAKE LIVING
ON MARS POSSIBLE.
If Kimberly Jones has her way, future space travelers
will be drinking their own shower water. Well, after
it's run through a few filters, of course. Jones, a
professor of civil engineering at Howard University
in Washington, is working with researchers from Purdue
University and Alabama A&M University at the NASA
Specialized Center of Research and Training for Advanced
Life Support. The center's mission is to create space
colonies whose inhabitants will live on crops they grow
themselves and recycle all their waste. Her work on
purifying wastewater by running it through filtering
"membranes" is vital to creating that environment.
In addition to her research, Jones for the past seven
years has taught the Introduction to Engineering course.
Run by five professors, one from each of the engineering
disciplines taught at Howard, the course is mandatory
for all freshman engineering majors.
Jones didn't always know she wanted to be an engineer.
"I sketched a lot as a child and thought I would be
an architect," she says. "But I liked math and science,
too." Jones needed a guidance counselor to "suggest
civil engineering as a way to combine the two."
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