Chemistry Lab Engages Community to Study and Clean Fort River
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When a community’s water experiences bacterial contamination, it’s important to target fixes where they will matter most. This spring, the Fort River—a tributary of the Connecticut River that runs through Amherst, MA and ends in neighboring Hadley—became a testing ground for various analysis methods as part of the honors‑level General Chemistry lab (CHEM 122H/123LS), offered by the College of Natural Sciences’s Department of Chemistry, working in partnership with the Massachusetts Geological Survey.
This lab, which developed into a hands‑on, course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) focused on water quality, guided freshmen teams as they analyzed Fort River samples using EPA‑validated nutrient and metal assays. These analyses helped to map how local land use affects water chemistry, producing data that pinpoints likely sources of bacterial contamination.
“Imagine you and your friends went to different parts of a river with buckets and special tests to see how much fertilizer or metals were in the water,” proposed Dr. Haoze He, a lecturer in the Department of Chemistry. “You discovered which spots were dirtier and shared your poster findings, just like real scientists, to help figure out where the pollution and bacteria are coming from.”
By embedding research into a first‑year lab, the Chemistry department is training future scientists while supplying a local organization, the Fort River Watershed Association, with insights on nutrient and bacterial pollution sources. “We’re proud of the collaboration between our students and the Fort River Watershed Association, which gives them meaningful, real-world research experience,” expressed Dr. He.
There are several ways that this work can immediately start benefitting students at UMass and beyond:
- Direct environmental action: by engaging with local groups, this work can focus clean-up and monitoring efforts on the nutrient hotspots identified by students, helping to clean up the river—in which it is currently unsafe to swim.
- Interdisciplinary Collaboration: this collaboration between two campus entities—the Department of Chemistry and the Massachusetts Geological Survey—benefiting an off-campus non-profit is a key example of the authentic experiential learning that the College of Natural Sciences champions.
- An educational model: the lab’s CURE templates (for sampling, experimental design, data recording, and reporting) can be adopted by other courses or schools to provide students with hands-on research experience.
- Extended research: enthusiastic participants are already planning future projects to deepen their understanding of Fort River’s water quality.
In addition to using the class’s findings to help the Fort River Watershed Association clean up the river, Dr. He and his team plan to disseminate these findings far and wide through various publications: “As we continue refining the CURE, we intend to compile and analyze multi‐semester student data and submit our findings on course outcomes and student-learning gains to peer‐reviewed chemical education journals.”
This project was made possible through a Howard Hughes Medical Inclusive Excellence grant.