Falta has also researched greenhouse gas control, a topic that first interested him about 15 years ago.

It is possible but expensive to capture carbon dioxide from flue-gas streams at coal-fired power plants, he said. The carbon dioxide would be compressed, sent down a pipeline to a suitable spot and injected into the ground.

Falta’s contribution has been to examine what would happen to the carbon dioxide underground under different conditions.

“The idea is it’s a partial solution as we transition away from fossil fuels,” he said. “We’d still be able to use some fossil fuels but capture the carbon dioxide emissions and store them geologically.”

David Freedman, chair of the Department of Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, said that Falta is a highly accomplished and influential researcher in his field.

“Ron has dedicated his career to studying contaminant transport and remediation,” Freedman said. “He has made important contributions to understanding how pollutants behave in complex groundwater systems, many of which are used as drinking water sources. I offer him my deepest congratulations on his recent awards. Each is well deserved.”

The American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists awarded Falta the 2020 University Research Award. The National Ground Water Association honored him with the 2020 John Hem Award. Falta also received the Clemson University Research, Scholarship and Artistic Achievement Award.

Falta said that of all his accomplishments, he is most proud of his students, who have gone on to careers with national labs, universities, state and federal regulators and environmental consultancies.

He currently has three master’s students and one Ph.D. candidate working in his lab.

Kien Pham, the Ph.D. candidate, is researching matrix diffusion, a process in which contaminants pollute the groundwater. With Falta, Pham is working to create a model that captures the process.

“Dr. Falta is the No. 1 or No. 2 researcher in remediation, and that’s why I decided I wanted to do my master’s and Ph.D. at Clemson,” Pham said. “He has a lot of industry experience that matches with mine. His research is very practical, very hands-on.”

Justin Trainor, a first-year master’s student, has taken two courses with Falta and is just starting research into borehole thermal energy storage with Falta as his advisor. Trainor’s long-term plans are to go into environmental consulting and work on thermal remediation.

“I didn’t see myself going into graduate school until I got introduced to the program and the faculty here,” Trainor said. “It really is an amazing program, and I’d recommend it to anyone.”

Anand Gramopadhye, the college’s dean, said each award is richly deserved and comes with nationwide recognition.

“These awards help launch junior faculty members’ careers and play a key role in positioning them as academic role models and mentors,” he said. “The awards also fuel innovation, foster partnerships and prepare the next generation of top talent. I offer all the recipients my heartfelt congratulations.”

Below is a brief look at each recipient. All have received CAREER awards, except Kai He, who received the Early Career Research grant.

Click their names to read full stories about their projects:

The research that Getman and her students conduct helps lay the groundwork to create more efficient, more effective and less expensive catalysts. Catalysts accelerate the rate of chemical reactions and are crucial to mass-producing a vast range of products from gasoline and diesel fuel to fertilizer and plastic.

Much of the group’s work involves creating models of chemical reactions on computers and can be done virtually.

When the pandemic hit, many experimental labs, where research must be done in person, were no longer able to accept high school and undergraduate interns. That left many unable to work the internships they had been counting on.

“We decided to take as many as we could from various programs,” Getman said. “Since computational work can be done virtually, at least we could provide the experience.”

The 11 interns included high school students from the Governor’s School for Science & Mathematics, rising first-year college students from Clemson’s EUREKA! program and students from other universities who were part of a National Science Foundation program called Research Experiences for Undergraduates.

(Hilliard, who found the opportunity on a website, had recently graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry. She is now pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University.)

To get to work, the interns had to be brought up to speed. They started working closely with the Getman lab’s four Ph.D. students and two post-doctoral researchers. Each took 1-3 interns and served as mentors, meeting with them regularly over Zoom.

While graduate students are well positioned to do the hands-on work in research labs, the point of having high school and undergraduate interns is to provide them the experience, even if tasks tend to take them a little longer.

“These are training positions,” Getman said. “You have to teach the methods, what you expect to get in the results and how to analyze, present and communicate results. That’s why these interns want to do the internship in the first place—to garner these skills—and someone has to teach them.”

Ricardo Garcia, a Ph.D. student in Getman’s lab, stepped up to help, working with two high school students.

“Once they lose the fear to talk, they get engaged,” Garcia said. “It’s very nice to see how someone from high school can understand, roughly speaking, highly technical terms and science.”

Also in the 2020-21 academic year, the Getman lab produced two student researchers who won major awards.

Anish Chaluvadi, who graduated in May, became the first Clemson student to receive the internationally competitive Gates Cambridge Scholarship and is headed to the University of Cambridge for graduate school.

He also won Clemson University’s Norris Medal for scholastic achievement and leadership and the J. Wesley Davis Leadership Award from Clemson’s College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences.

“Dr. Getman has been influential in shaping my understanding of what research truly is,” Chaluvadi said. “She showed me how to pivot and how to learn from my mistakes. She has been a great mentor and a support system when the class load and extracurriculars were getting too heavy. She was understanding about who I am as a person. She was inclusive. And she was a woman in STEM and showed how she can be a leader.”

Xiaohong Zhang, a Ph.D. student in the Getman lab, won the college’s Outstanding Graduate Researcher Award. Zhang was set to graduate in August and was poised to start a career as a data scientist with an Atlanta marketing firm, where she will use the same computational techniques she learned in Getman’s lab.

“I think the trust built between Dr. Getman and I helped me succeed in my graduate studies,” Zhang said. “She’s a very good mentor.”

Getman said she has enjoyed seeing her students’ hard work and vision garner some recognition.

“I know how highly I think of them, and it’s another step to getting other people to recognize how amazing these people are,” she said. “When they are getting this recognition at the University and college levels or beyond, it’s really good to see.” 

Jennifer Ogle leaned in close to look at a lidar scanner perched atop a tripod on a sun-drenched sidewalk at Clemson University. She and two Ph.D. students were measuring slope grade on wheelchair accessible parking spaces in the adjoining lot. Anything more than  2%, she said, would be too steep. 

Ogle and her students were working behind Sikes Hall on a sweltering afternoon as part of their in-depth study into what areas of campus need upgrades to comply with the American with Disabilities Act and proposed rulemaking. They have used high-tech equipment, such as drones and lidar scanners, along with old-school tools, such as levels and tape measures, to examine the entire classroom district of campus, an area that encompasses more than 35 miles of sidewalk.

For Ogle, it was the result of a vow she made to herself more than two decades ago to never let a student graduate without knowing about the law.

Clemson officials are using the study, first started in 2019, as a guide to make campus easier to traverse for people with accessibility impacts.

“If we have a campus that is more accessible, that is going to go a very long way in equity, diversity and inclusion of our students, faculty and staff,” said Ogle, who is associate chair and professor in the Glenn Department of Civil Engineering.

Todd Barnette, chief facilities officer at Clemson, said prior to the Ogle study, he had pockets of data but no single source to guide funding for accessibility upgrades.

“It seemed like a good idea to do an inventory and assessment of sidewalks with their slopes and systematically start working away at it,” he said. “We felt like the information would be extremely beneficial to us. We are facilities people and eager to fix things.”

As of late June, about $500,000 in upgrades have been made as a result of the study, Barnette said.

‘Better for everyone’

Barry Anderson, campus planner and landscape architect, said the study will help him identify “hot spots” where several improvements can be made in a concentrated area. He will then come up with plans to make those areas more accessible.

“Working with Dr. Ogle has been a great pleasure,”  he said. “Anytime that we partner with our students it is a great privilege because they bring with them a very practical perspective on how they experience campus on a daily basis.”

It has helped the students, too. Among them is Logan Wade, who has been measuring slopes and parking spot widths and entering the data into an app.

“It’s exposing me to real research,” he said. “I just completed my first year of my Ph.D. program, and I’m getting a sense of what real data collection out in the field looks like.” 

Sababa Islam and Fengjiao Zou, both Ph.D. candidates, have helped develop data-collection apps, collect data and train and manage students. They have also created a manual to guide them in the field. 

“I like being involved in something that is inclusive and helpful and makes a difference,” Islam said. “We are looking at campus with a whole different view.” 

Some of the improvements are going above and beyond minimum requirements. Channon Chambers, a Clemson building official, said that on Ogle’s recommendation, the University altered some pavement grooves so the vibrations wouldn’t be wrenching for military veterans. 

“We’re trying to make it better for everyone, whether you are in a wheelchair or whether you are just walking along with a friend who has a sprained ankle,” he said. “We’re all getting older and could use fewer trip hazards. Dr. Ogle has certainly raised awareness.”  

A surprising phone call

The path to the back of Sikes Hall started with—of all things—Ogle’s collection of mid-century modern pottery. When she was a research engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the early 2000s, Ogle had an acquaintance who would find pieces at thrift shops and estate sales and call her. She bought the pieces she liked.

One day she got a call, but it had nothing to do with pottery. This time the call was from a hospital.

It quickly became clear that the acquaintance’s home would need some accessibility upgrades before he could return. The acquaintance couldn’t do it himself and couldn’t afford to pay to have it done. She remembers thinking, “I am a civil engineer. I should be able to do that.’”

But she had never been exposed to accessibility requirements. Ogle did her own research, and then she and her husband rolled up their sleeves. They built a ramp, installed handholds in the shower and checked clearances.

“I told myself I would never, ever let a student graduate from our civil engineering program without having heard about the Americans with Disabilities Act,” Ogle said.

Once Ogle was exposed to the need, it was something she couldn’t unsee. When she arrived at Clemson as an assistant professor, she noticed sidewalks that came to an abrupt end, or sidewalks too steep to traverse comfortably in a wheelchair.

Ogle started talking with the director of the University’s Student Accessibility Services about how she could help identify areas that were not accessible. Shortly after that, an accessibility task force was created, and she was asked to be a part of it.

“We started with small surveys of areas we knew could use improvement and where students would need additional support,” Ogle said.

‘Ahead of the game’

The push for greater accessibility started with one-off projects. The first was between Brackett and Hardin halls, where steep slopes and narrow squeezes made for tough navigation.

Ogle and her team measured ramp slopes and open clearances. They looked for ways to make it easier to get to main access points and suggested moving some parking spots. “It was a large, group effort to make that project go forward,” Ogle said.

The Ogle team was later called to help with other projects, one by the Academic Success Center and one involving a nearby lawn. The task force started considering a five-year plan, but it was hard to predict what needs would pop up next, Ogle said. It was an opportunity, she said, to inventory all outdoor areas of campus, a move that would put Clemson ahead of the game.

The study was broken into two phases. The first was to create a network that represents all the sidewalks, along with obstructions, such as curbs and stairs. In phase two, the team is looking more closely at all of the assets to see if they are accessible. As of early June, the team had finished its survey of the eastern swath of campus, and they were shifting their focus to west campus.

The team expected to have all its data collected by the end of the summer. They are working with the Clemson Center for Geospatial Technologies to create a dashboard that helps keep track of how many ramps, parking spaces and other features could use improvements. It will be the culmination of a project that helped educate more than 20 students.

“In my book, that’s great because all those students are going to go out into the world knowing everything they need to know about accessibility,” Ogle said. “It’s a win-win.”