Unearthing Potential: Startup Makes Geothermal More Efficient
Inquiry: Exploring the Impact of University Research | February 4, 2021
It was 15 years ago, as he was committing to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, that Jimmy Randolph began his focus into geothermal energy—a line of exploration that would lead him to ultimately bring a new sustainable heating and cooling technology from theory to reality.
“It felt really important to me that my work, in math and physics, have real-world impacts in the environmental space,” he said. “It is very exciting to see this work start coming to fruition, and to look back and see the path that brought me to this point.”
Today, Randolph, PhD, is chief technology officer at Darcy Solutions, a Twin Cities-based company that aims to deliver geothermal heating and cooling in a more cost-effective and energy-efficient way than previous systems that is also more environmentally friendly than conventional heating and cooling systems. The startup launched in 2018 with support from UMN Technology Commercialization.
Randolph said he hopes Darcy’s systems will help to address the energy demand of heating and cooling buildings, which has been relatively ignored in the larger picture of greenhouse gas emissions compared to the more visible electricity generation and transportation sectors.
Balancing Values: How Attitudes about Money Affect Relationships
Inquiry: Exploring the Impact of University Research | May 30, 2019
Love may bring two people together, but sometimes money is what drives them apart. Matters of finance can strain relationships in many ways, such as when spouses keep secret debts from their partners or, as a recent study showed, when wives make more than their husbands.
One source of conflict is how differently people are raised to think about saving, spending, and investing. Yiting Li, a PhD student in family social science at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development, is studying how the financial values parents instill in their children can clash with the financial habits of their romantic partners as they grow older and enter into long-term relationships.
“When you are young, you observe your parents as financial role models and learn things from them that you internalize as part of your own identity,” Li said. “This is why money is sometimes really hard to talk about—because there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s about personal values.”
Up until the time children leave for college or otherwise move out of the house, they pick up cues from how their parents talk about money and budgeting, a process called financial socialization. Part of this process happens intentionally, when parents make a point of teaching their children, for example, to leave expensive products on the shelf or stick to a shopping list at the grocery store, guiding their children away from impulsive spending.
Student-Driven Inquiry: New Lab Gives CBS Undergrads Room to Explore
Inquiry: Exploring the Impact of University Research | September 23, 2019
Every semester, students in the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences lead their own explorations into research through an approach known as “active learning.”
“It’s about trying to get the students to have a role in their own learning,” said Adam Engelhardt, assistant education specialist with CBS’s Department of Biology Teaching and Learning (BTL). “It’s designed to be the opposite of the traditional university model, where you just have a big auditorium and there’s someone at the front who’s talking, and the students are just sitting there taking notes.”
This fall, a newly opened laboratory is providing a better-equipped space for CBS students to delve into these active learning research experiences. The Active Learning Lab, which will serve more than 350 CBS students each semester, supports groups of students working to define and pursue research questions with real-world relevance that are based on subjects from their coursework. The lab was developed as part of a larger, $9.9 million renovation funded by CBS on two floors of the Biological Sciences Center.
A Quest to Drill Below Antarctic Ice
Inquiry: Exploring the Impact of University Research | October 10, 2017
The crisp air of fall may have come to Minnesota, but the warmer months are coming soon down in Antarctica—and John Goodge has big summer plans.
Last year, Goodge, Ph.D., professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth, arrived on Earth’s coldest continent to begin testing a custom-designed drill that could dig deeper into the Antarctic ice sheet than any had before—so deep, in fact, that it would sample the billion-year-old bedrock below it.
Now, Goodge and project co-leader Jeff Severinghaus, PhD, geosciences professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, are gearing up to conduct a final spate of tests on the drill to clear it for use in research. Their efforts, funded by over $10 million from the National Science Foundation, will give researchers access to never-before-studied ice and rock samples from nearly 11,000 feet below the surface of the ice.
“Our goal will be for the RAID system to venture out to drill multiple holes per season,” Goodge said. “At this point, we have some 40 researchers from lots of different institutions across the US currently involved with RAID or soon to be involved with it. The project will give the scientific community access to a rich record of geological and climatic change.”
Why is it so valuable to drill to the bottom of the ice sheet and below it? The answer depends on who you ask—and what they study.