February 13, 2017 – As an agricultural engineer, Erin Webb would do almost anything in the name of science.
Not so long ago, the senior research and development scientist within Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Environmental Sciences Division was hauling cow waste in buckets once a week from a college dairy farm to a laboratory. The task, while not exactly glamorous, proved a necessary step in determining how constructed wetlands could be used to treat dairy wastewater.
“You have to be willing to do whatever it takes to find the science,” Webb said. “If that means physically carrying a bucket, you do it because the reward is too great—you just might make a discovery that could impact the world.”
Working in a profession that has the potential to shape and change how the biosystem functions is something a farm girl from rural Union County in East Tennessee never envisioned just a few decades ago.
The daughter of a part-time cattle farmer, full-time excavator, and logger, Webb was put to work early on caring for the family land, harvesting crops, and tending to livestock. Days spent at her father’s side learning the value of cultivating land showed her one thing: that working in agriculture was a great way of life, although a hard one.
“I watched so many people in my hometown work long, grueling hours, nurturing the environment,” she said. “These friends and neighbors weren’t farmers to me; they were scientists in their own right.”
Active participation in 4-H as a high school student helped Webb continue to see the broader scale of agriculture as a science. Encouragement from a mathematics teacher inspired her to explore engineering, ultimately leading Webb to join other students at ORNL’s Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) High School Summer Math–Science Technology Institute.
“For two weeks, I joined other kids from rural areas to do research projects at ORNL. I worked on a team studying the impacts of defects on ceramic strength. It was so important in giving me confidence to pursue an engineering degree and a research career,” she recalled. “It’s humorous to me that people often overlook the science of agriculture. Kids are afraid of science and math, especially girls, but what they don’t realize is that they’ve been working in it all along, on the farm.”
From Mars to Oak Ridge
After earning a scholarship to study agricultural engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Webb soon was on a fast track to career success. Diverse research projects followed not only as an undergraduate but also as a graduate student in biosystems engineering at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Projects ranged from the cow waste experiment to a sweeter stint at an M&M candy factory collecting fructose wastewater. Webb also worked for a bit in a beverage plant, building a mini-bioreactor to produce biomass from brewery wastewater.
Webb has even taken her research to extraterrestrial levels. While completing her Ph.D. in agricultural and biological engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, she and a team of researchers developed a greenhouse for use on Mars, demonstrating how radishes would respond to a growing environment with limited water and low pressure.
Although Webb’s research has taken her to diverse regions, 10 years ago she made her way back to East Tennessee and to ORNL. At the lab, Webb studies biomass to understand how plants can be harvested, stored, processed, and transported to produce fuels or bio-derived materials for 3D printing.
“I’m looking at biomass and trying to understand how we can use it for industrial processes,” she said. “What can we create from our renewable resources?”
The research may be complex, but the outcome is simple.
Giving back to the land that inspired her
“I want to find out what can be produced by biomass so that it could be manufactured in economically depressed counties,” Webb said. “My research is about understanding what’s possible so that jobs can be created for future generations. The resources are there, but we’ve got to show people different ways to apply them—help them understand that a solution to job growth is found within the land.”
In her spare time, Webb manages a hay and cattle farm not far from her childhood home. She and her husband, also an agricultural engineer, have a 94-acre farm where they are raising their two sons to appreciate the land and what it can offer to inquisitive young minds.
“You know, I teasingly tell my sons they can grow up to be any kind of engineer they want to be,” Webb said. “I believe that if you approach life like an engineer, you can figure most anything out. I don’t have a green thumb, for example, but I want to take a plant apart, study it from inside and out and up and down and figure out what we can do with it, what can we make out of it, how can we use it.”
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the DOE's Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://energy.gov/science/. — by Jennifer Burke
