InSites is a quarterly newsletter that highlights the personalities and projects of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) of The University of Tennessee. WMREI is an affiliate of the EERC.
WMREI was created in 1985 as a state-funded Center of Excellence. Research areas include solid-, hazardous-, and nuclear-waste management; waste minimization; and pollution prevention.
Biotechnology is the focal point of the institute's technical research, while issues involving public attitudes and federal/state policies related to waste-management issues are the primary concerns of the institute's policy research.
For additional information about InSites, or to be added to our mailing list, please write InSites, WMREI, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, call 865-974-1156, or fax 865-974-1838. Or, if you prefer, email us.
Table of Contents
REGIONAL THE ART (and Science) of COLLABORATION, By David Brill
HIGH-PERFORMANCE HOMES on the HORIZON, By Kris Christen
Education for a Sustainable Environment: A Global Perspective,
By Rosalyn McKeown
Staff Citings
THE ART (and Science)
of COLLABORATION
From his windowed office on the eighth floor of the University of Tennessee
(UT) administration tower, David Millhorn takes in a broad view of the campus
community sprawling below. This lofty vantage point might incline some to
remain fixed on the big picture, while overlooking the less momentous—but
no less vital— events that make up the day-to-day life of a major research
university.
Not so with Millhorn, the University of Tennessee’s new vice president for research. For most of his 30-year career as a scientist, Millhorn has cast his gaze on some of the smallest elements of life. As a physiologist, first at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and later at the University of Cincinnati (UC), where he served as chairman of the department of molecular and cellular physiology, Millhorn investigated the activities occurring at the genetic and cellular level that cause diseases ranging from cancer to diabetes, from heart disease to cystic fibrosis.
But Millhorn’s focus on the basic structures of life has never interfered with his interest in—and aptitude for— studying the larger issues and opportunities that converge to form the arena he refers to as “big science.” His work record reflects a man as capable—and comfortable— at the laboratory bench as he is at the helm of the university’s $273 million research enterprise.
AT HOME IN THE LAB
In assuming his administrative responsibilities, Millhorn has reduced, but
not eliminated, the time he spends in the laboratory—part of his strategy
for staying grounded in the realm of basic research while orchestrating the
overarching research strategy for the UT system.
“I still dearly love conducting lab investigations and the quick response you can achieve and your ability to turn things around quickly,” he says. “Universities don’t turn around very quickly, but I see that as a major challenge here, and I’ve always responded well to challenges.”
Millhorn’s track record bears this out. As inaugural director of the Genomic Research Institute (GRI) at the University of Cincinnati (UC), Millhorn—and his staff of 400, including 45 faculty members—explored the role of gene expression in causing myriad endocrine disorders, among them diabetes, cancer, and obesity.
GRI, established in 2001, occupies a 360,000-square-foot facility on 25 acres donated by Aventis Pharmaceuticals Inc. The gift of existing buildings and surrounding acreage remains the largest single donation ever made to UC.
GRI represents a collaboration among university investigators and private-sector firms (among them, Aventis Pharmaceuticals; Evotec OAI, a leading European biotech firm; and Cincinnati-based Procter and Gamble Pharmaceuticals), as well as government entities (the state of Ohio and the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base).
In 2003, Millhorn played a lead role in organizing the Genome Research Infrastructure Partnership (GRIP), which was awarded a $9-million grant by the Ohio Biomedical Research and Technology Transfer Commission. The consortium comprises Wright State University, GRI and UC, the Children’s Hospital Research Foundation, Procter and Gamble Pharmaceuticals, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and Acero Inc., developer of a software platform for processing genetic data.
According to Gary Sayler, director of UT’s Waste Management Research and Education Institute and UT’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology, success in an increasingly competitive global marketplace will come down to this type of relationship, which unites universities with private and governmental partners.
“Across the nation, publicly funded state research universities are challenged not only to conductd high-quality research but also to translate this research into economic development and improved career and employment opportunities for their states’ citizens,” Sayler says.
“Dr. Millhorn brings the skills and experience to help UT and Tennessee leapfrog forward with commercial and research partners in pursuing this new level of commercialization.”
APPLYING A PROVEN STRATEGY
Millhorn’s creation of the collaborative framework for GRI and GRIP will inform
and guide his efforts for UT, where he will lead the university system’s research
enterprise at its campuses and research centers throughout the state. Central
to that effort will be enhancing UT’s collaboration with established research
partners, chief among them Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), as well as
other governmental organizations and private-sector firms.
“Our relationship with ORNL has existed since 1943 because of geography, but it exists now programmatically,” he says. “There have been collaborative ventures in the past because of closeness of the facility, but with UT managing the lab, it’s a whole new ball game. I intend to use the same strategies here as we used at GRI, but on a much larger stage.” \Millhorn’s counterpart at ORNL, James Roberto, deputy director for Science and Technology, regards Millhorn’s capabilities as propitious as the timing of his arrival at UT.
“Dr. Millhorn understands the value of the partnership and the urgency of capitalizing on this unique moment in time for both institutions,” Roberto says.
According to GRI Interim Director George Thomas, himself one of Millhorn’s early recruits, Millhorn’s strength in nurturing broad collaboration lies in his ability to understand the goals of the partnering organizations and his commitment to ensuring that all participants see a scientific as well as a financial return on their investments.
“This meant many hours of face-toface meetings prior to securing support from each organization’s management,” says Thomas. “Once GRI became operational, Dr. Millhorn did not make the common mistake of treating these organizations only as sources of funds; he understood that we must offer real value in what we provide.”
To ensure that the private-sector partners received their due, Millhorn tapped a number of business professionals from the Cincinnati area to serve as advisors, and he appointed a retired Procter and Gamble executive to serve as GRI’s associate director for business operations.
EVERYBODY WINS
In terms of collaborative payoffs, local and state government and chambers
of commerce saw GRIP as a way to translate university-based research into
job opportunity and economic development. Pharmaceutical firms benefited from
GRI’s basic research, which laid the groundwork for development of effective
disease treatments.
“Our goal was to identify the genetic basis for diseases and develop compounds that would neutralize that process,” says Millhorn. “Like many health-science labs, GRI was funded through grants from the National Institutes of Health. We used those federal dollars to conduct basic research—research that pharmaceutical companies would otherwise have had to fund through their own budgets.”
And all GRIP partners benefited from access to facilities and funding that no single partner could have mustered on its own.
Beyond his ability to attract a diverse cadre of project participants and reward them for their involvement, Millhorn has proven equally effective at attracting funding. At the time of his arrival at UT in August, Millhorn’s research funding totaled nearly $10 million, the bulk of it from the National Institutes of Health. In building GRI, Millhorn secured substantial investments from UC, including over $40 million in renovations and equipment.
“UT has a tremendous opportunity to lead the nation and the world in research breakthroughs in many areas, and the benefit to Tennessee will be enormous,” says UT President John Petersen. “Having individuals the caliber of Dr. Millhorn on our staff is the key to attracting major grant funding. His track record in that regard is superb.”
STAFFING EXCELLENCE
Millhorn contends that the success of UT’s system-wide research effort will
come down to two elements: bringing the right complement of public and private
partners to the table and, equally as important, assembling a world-class
staff.
“One thing I’ve learned is that your strongest resource is your people,” he says. “No one has the market on brain power or vision, so you have to bring in people you trust and who have the types of skills you want, whether you’re at a university, a major partnership, or a simple laboratory.”
Among his short-term staffing priorities is helping the university fill the joint UT/ORNL appointments known as Governor’s Chairs. The Governor’s Chair Program seeks National Academy of Sciences- caliber researchers to participate in joint laboratory-university ventures.
Research areas currently under consideration for Governor’s Chair appointments include computational science and mathematics (the chair will affiliate with the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences), functional genomics/computational biology/systems biology (the chair will affiliate with the Joint Institute of Biological Sciences), neutron sciences (the chair will affiliate with the Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences), materials sciences (the chair will affiliate with the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials), environmental electron microscopy, theory and modeling of soft materials, nanoscience, and nuclear power engineering.
“People go where good people are,” Millhorn says. “Once the Governor’s Chairs have been hired, I expect they will exert some gravitational pull in bringing other quality people to UT, especially junior people who are in starting-level positions and want to be where the action is. We expect that these outstanding scientists will bring in individuals, but we also hope they’ll recruit integrated research teams.”
ORNL’s James Roberto shares Millhorn’s vision, both in terms of collaboration and the vital role of recruiting.
“Over the past five years, ORNL has been transformed under the leadership of UT-Battelle,” Roberto says. “Coming on line now or within the next year are world-leading facilities for neutron scattering, high-performance computing, and nanoscale science and technology. Increased university/laboratory collaboration can leverage these assets to recruit the best faculty and researchers, to generate new research directions and programs, and to provide national leadership on a broad scale in important emerging areas of science and technology.”
FROM GOOD TO BEST
On a slate-gray fall afternoon, Millhorn sits at his desk, mulling the future
of the university that spreads away eight stories below. With some tact, he
confesses that he regards UT as a relative “late-bloomer” in the research
realm. For Millhorn, that poses the perfect challenge: taking what’s good
and making it better.
Millhorn also acknowledges a preference for creating excellence rather than managing it over the long term.
“I prefer to build things rather than run things,” he says. “Running things is a chore. Building things is a challenge.”
In that regard, Millhorn is perfectly positioned in his role at UT, both in terms of personal ambition and the as-ofyet unrealized potential he sees in the university’s research enterprise.
“I want to build the best university/national lab relationship in the country. I want to build a science infrastructure here that will make us a leader in the South,” he says. “Beyond that, universities owe a lot to the states they reside in, and we need to take what goes on here and turn it into something that’s useful— something that creates wealth, improves quality of life, or provides new understanding that is meaningful to society.”
* * *
The University of Tennessee’s Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) was created in 1985 as a state-funded Center of Excellence. Research areas include solid-, hazardous-, and nuclear-waste management; waste minimization; and pollution prevention. Biotechnology is the focal point of the institute’s technical research, while questions of public attitudes and federal/state relations are the primary concerns of the institute’s policy research. For additional information, write WMREI, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996- 4134, or call 865-974-4251. Web address: http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/insites/. Fax: 865-974-1838.
HIGH-PERFORMANCE HOMES on
the HORIZON
Imagine a super energy-efficient house with an electricity meter that sometimes
runs backwards, even on the hottest days of the year. That’s no small feat,
given that roughly 80 percent of the electricity generated in the United States—much
of it from coal-fired power plants—is used to heat and cool buildings and
power the appliances they contain. If a major portion of the new homes built
over the next 10-20 years employed such energy-efficient features, air pollution
and national dependence on foreign energy sources could be reduced dramatically.
The technology already exists, as demonstrated by several near-zero-energy test homes that Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has built, together with Habitat for Humanity’s Loudon County, Tennessee, affiliate and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the country’s largest public electric utility. The challenge now is to transfer this technology to the building sector to ensure its use in new home construction, and the University of Tennessee’s Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC) is assisting in that endeavor.
In a first-of-its kind workshop, in October, EERC, together with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), a regional environmental group, convened a group of researchers, utilities, architects, builders, equipment manufacturers, potential homebuyers, and environmentalists to discuss barriers to getting this technology into the mainstream construction sector and how these hurdles might be overcome.
“We as an institution are interested in finding the smartest, most efficient ways of consuming energy, and this workshop was devoted to that very topic,” says Jack Barkenbus, EERC’s executive director. “There are things that we can do to reduce our reliance on energy and foreign supplies of that energy, and we need to develop those methods and get them out in front of the public.”
ROAD TO ZERO ENERGY
To help reduce energy use in buildings, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
embarked on a research initiative in 2002 called the Zero Energy Home (ZEH).
The goal is to build low-cost homes that—through the use of advanced construction
techniques, energy-efficient appliances, and renewable technologies—return
as much energy to the power grid as they take. Overall, DOE researchers are
aiming for a 70-percent reduction in energy use and up to a 30- percent increase
in onsite power generation in new residential buildings by 2020. And, with
the technologies already developed, they’re also pushing for 20- to 30-percent
energy savings in existing homes.
“We’re hoping to offer a model for communities to transform their building industry from part of the problem to part of the solution by leading new home owners and builders toward houses that boast high efficiency and the use of solar panels to generate some of their own electricity,” says Jeff Christian, director of ORNL’s Buildings Technology Center.
Christian, with help from TVA and Habitat for Humanity, broke ground for the first near-ZEH in a Lenoir City subdivision in June 2002. For less than $100,000, they constructed an all-electric house, which has been occupied by a family of four since November of that year. It was the first house in TVA’s power distribution area to sell solar energy back to the grid. Two more such homes were built in the same subdivision in 2003 and a fourth in 2004, with a fifth to be finished by the end of 2005.
Dozens of sensors monitor electricity consumption, temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, and hot water usage. With each successive house built, the researchers have brought down the amount of electricity consumed, as well as the material costs. The total average daily energy cost to operate these 1,000- to 1,200-square foot homes stands at $1 for the first house, $0.88 for the second, $0.79 for the third, and $0.75 for the fourth, with a goal of $0.60 per day for the fifth (see graph opposite page).
These figures take into account the credits received from TVA for power generated by the homes’ solar panels for distribution on the utility’s power lines. By comparison, a conventional house in Lenoir City uses between $4–$5 of energy daily.
“To achieve these results, we stuck with what worked and kept tweaking the rest,” Christian says.
ENERGY-EFFICIENT FEATURES
The secret behind the houses’ energy effi- ciency lies in well insulated,
airtight construction, with the walls and roof incorporating advanced structural
insulated panels and infrared reflective paint that keeps indoor heat inside
during the winter and outdoor heat outside during the summer.
Each house also comes equipped with energy-efficient heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning equipment, as well as Energy Star appliances, which are powered by photovoltaic panels on the rooftops. Other energysaving features include compact fluorescent light bulbs; low-emissivity, gas-filled, double-paned windows; and extended roof overhangs on the south side to shade windows during the summer. A mechanical ventilation system maintains high indoor air quality by filtering outside air into the houses throughout the day, conditioning it in response to interior carbon dioxide, humidity, and temperature measurements. Measurements show that these houses have lower total volatile organic compounds than similar, more conventionally built, homes in the same subdivision.
 |
Energy usage—and costs—decline as
zero-energy homes evolve and improve in efficiency. |
In addition to being energy efficient, the homes are also of higher quality than conventional homes, with fresher air and more stable thermal comfort, as well as more natural lighting, Christian says.
Overall, the near-zero energy test homes that ORNL and its collaborators have designed and built so far have been shown to use 50 to 70 percent less energy than typical new American homes. On sunny days, “it’s not unusual to see the electric meter running backward as the homes’ roof-mounted solar panels actually generate more electricity than they use,” Christian says.
PEAK LOAD REDUCTION
That’s music to TVA’s ears, because with all the development occurring in
the region, the utility is having trouble meeting power demands, especially
during the summer months.
“This is a way to possibly reduce that total demand and maybe defer having to build new generation capacity and new transmission lines for the electricity,” says John Proffitt, marketing manager of TVA’s Energy Right program. “There are some real advantages from our end.”
Environmentalists are keen on ZEHs too. “These homes put solar energy on the grid during peak hours when TVA’s coal-fired power plants are running full bore and older, inefficient plants are brought online to keep everyone’s airconditioning running,” said Stephen Smith, SACE executive director, at the workshop. “This is a real problem,” he added, because East Tennessee ranks near the top in the country for air pollution, with a number of counties in non-compliance with federal air-quality regulations. To help change this, “we need to squeeze more work out of each kilowatt hour,” Smith said.
GETTING BUY-IN
Unlike other parts of the country, though, East Tennessee is devoid of an
easy way for someone interested in buying a ZEH to do so, according to some
who have tried. In places like California, where energy crises have motivated
the average homebuyer, “builders can’t get enough of these materials,” said
David Bolt, founder of Sustainable Future, which is working to help move ZEHs
from the research phase into the mainstream marketplace. But in this region,
it’s difficult to find skilled builders who know how to design such a house
and get the most energy savings per dollar.
Bob Montgomery, a local homeowner who participated in the EERC workshop, agrees. “You’re essentially paying tuition for them to learn, and then they won’t guarantee these things if they haven’t done them before,” he notes.
Builders and architects present at the workshop pointed out that they need a centralized repository for ZEH data that they can tap into. Equipment vendors noted that if they had more information on what ZEHs should look like, they could better model their products to meet these designs.
To overcome such hurdles, workshop participants discussed the possibility of developing a ZEH kit of parts with assembly instructions that interested homebuyers could order from a Web site.
The key to bringing down costs, says Christian, is increased demand that leads to high-volume production. Such a kit would encourage mass production as well as standardization of the components. “A kit would dramatically cut construction costs, because they’d be so quick to erect and could be customized for any region and adapted to any style of home,” he adds.
Barkenbus agrees. The higher energy prices go, “the more people will be interested in this,” he says. “It’s going to take some early innovators to jumpstart the process, but at some stage, if we want the larger public to be involved, there’s going to have to be a price signal that gets them involved.”
* * *
Education for a Sustainable Environment: A Global
Perspective
As we enter the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, one
of UT’s resident experts fields invitations from around the world.
IN 2000, WITH ASSISTANCE FROM CHARLES A. Hopkins, who holds the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s chair on reorienting teacher education to address sustainability, I developed the Education for Sustainable Development Toolkit. The Toolkit is an easy-to-use manual for individuals and organizations from both the education and community sectors.
This resource addresses the potentially powerful alliance of school systems and communities working together to achieve local sustainability goals. Together they can reorient existing curriculums to create locally relevant and culturally appropriate education. Since the Toolkit was posted on the Web in 2001, it’s been translated into 13 languages and accessed by thousands of browsers worldwide.
With the start of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD), which runs from 2005 to 2014, I have received numerous invitations to speak outside the United States to explain the basics of education for sustainable development (ESD) and the strategy to push the concept forward into new territory.
I traveled to Dresden, Germany, this past summer to meet with participants from 20 countries in an environmental management course organized by the Centre for International Postgraduate Studies of Environmental Management at Dresden Technical University. I spoke with faculty and students about ESD and the importance of education in bolstering the effectiveness of environmental management and conservation programs. Also during the summer, I attended the Asia-Pacific regional launch of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development in Nagoya, Japan.
Beijing: A City of Change
Later in the summer, I visited Beijing Normal University (BNU) to speak at
a conference on ESD for teachers, school administrators, and professors. Many
in this group were part of a new graduate program in ESD at BNU. The graduate
students had read the Toolkit, which has been translated into Chinese by my
colleague Professor Wang Min, and the students had conducted many of the Toolkit
activities in class.
I worked with them to expand the Toolkit to include pedagogical techniques to engage students of different learning modalities (i.e., visual, auditory, and tactile- kinesthetic) as a way to create educational equity in the classroom. It was a challenging and rewarding afternoon.
I had first visited Beijing in summer 2000 and couldn’t help but notice how much the city had changed in five years. The one-story buildings—primarily shops and homes—that once lined the streets have been replaced with high-rise office buildings and apartments. Professor Min reported that at one time there were more than 6,000 streets in Beijing boasting traditional architecture. Now, only a few hundred survive.
Bicycles once abounded on the streets as a primary means of transportation. The bicycle lanes still exist, but I estimate that the volume of bike traffic has declined by 20 percent since my last visit. Cars now choke the roads.
I visited a school in a new suburb of Beijing. It was a suburb for 300,000 people, and it had been erected within the last five years to accommodate immigration to Beijing. The school was thoroughly modern and had several features that, as a former high-school teacher, I found impressive. A broadcasting studio allows students to report school-wide news. An electronic sign in front of the building announces the day’s activities. And the school’s communications system is capable of sending text messages to all the students’ parents via their cell phones, alerting them of meetings or special events.
Progress and Power Consumption
Another of my colleagues, who had first visited Beijing in summer 1987, also
noted the remarkable pace of change. In 1987, during the summer heat, people
fanned themselves and slept on the bridge to catch the cool breeze coming
off the river. By the mid-90s, most people cooled themselves with electric
fans. By 2005, the electric fans had been supplanted by window and central
air-conditioners.
All this progress in cooling technology has come with a price. The minister of energy reported that the demand for electricity this summer was nearly 20 percent higher than last year. Imagine the challenges of providing almost one-fifth more energy in one year.
Despite the dramatic growth in energy demand, China appears to be modernizing in a way that avoids many of the problems I’ve witnessed in other major cities in the throes of change. The city is clean and orderly; crime rates are remarkably low. Yes, China has areas of apparent poverty, but I did not see the massive shantytowns and squatter colonies that are part of the urbanization process in Latin America.
* * *
Staf Citings
PUBLICATIONS.
Rosalyn McKeown, director of the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Center for
Geography and Environmental Education, a division of UT’s Energy, Environment
and Resources Center (EERC), has written an essay for “Human World,” a special
Web feature created by Earth and Sky, the syndicated science program that
airs on National Public Radio. McKeown was one of 50 nationally renowned scientists
asked to contribute to the project. McKeown’s essay addresses global human
environmental impacts. You can find McKeown’s essay here:
APPOINTMENTS.
Eric Ogle, program coordinator of EERC’s Community Partnership Center, has
been appointed to the board of directors of the Rural Telecommunications Congress
(RTC) and was recently elected treasurer of the organization. RTC is a national
organization devoted to ensuring that U.S. rural areas have the technology
and telecommunications resources they need for education, healthcare, and
economic development. Ogle currently consults with Tennessee communities on
technology and telecommunications issues and was instrumental in creating
a wireless community network in the city of Newport, Tennessee. Before joining
UT, Ogle served as director of tourism for Cocke County, which contains a
considerable portion of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and he assisted
the Tennessee Valley Authority in its marketing and economic development efforts.
l
INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVES.
EERC Executive Director Jack Barkenbus has returned from a three-month assignment
to Greece and Turkey under the auspices of the Fulbright’s “Aegean Initiative”
program. One of his tasks involved bringing Turkish and Greek scholars and
practitioners together in a workshop setting to discuss issues of mutual interest.
On May 17, Barkenbus convened a workshop in Istanbul, Turkey, titled “Regional
Environmental Youth Initiatives for the Protection of Coastal Areas.” The
meeting took place at Kadir Has University, along the historic Golden Horn
section of Istanbul. His summary of the workshop is available here: http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/Barkenbus-Fulbright2005-Report.pdf
