Today at ISU
Cyclone News
Admissions

ALLEMAN SET FOR NEW DUTIES
 

After spending the fall semester teaching and doing research in Greece as a Fulbright Scholar, Jim Alleman is settling into his new role as chair of the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at Iowa State. One of the first projects on his to-do list is taking what he learned in Greece and putting that knowledge into practice in his department.

Alleman taught a PhD-level course on wastewater treatment to 24 students at the Technical University of Greece. It turns out that he learned as much from his students as they did from him. “I learned an entirely new analytical technique,” Alleman acknowledges. “It’s a new field of research that uses microprobes to measure environmental contaminants. It’s an idea that actually came out of Canada in 1999, but I’ve never seen it used in any U.S. labs.

“It’s funny,” Alleman continues, “I had to go to a remote university on a tiny island, really in the middle of nowhere, to find out what this is all about. That speaks volumes about what they’re doing at that university. I thought we were at the top of the heap when it came to technology, but those students are well educated, and I don’t think I appreciated that as much as I should have before I went there.”

Alleman—who earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD from the University of Notre Dame—plans to use his newfound knowledge to further his research efforts in wastewater treatment, an area in which he is well known and respected.

In recent years, Alleman has been working on thermophilic, or high-temperature, treatment. Traditionally wastewater has been processed in a large tank at normal, or ambient, temperatures. Alleman, however, is studying the effect of raising the temperature in a reactor, thereby increasing the activity of bacteria in the wastewater. “Bacteria that operate at high temperatures live fast and die fast,” he notes, “and that’s good for us because we want to degrade something fast, then we want those bacteria to go away. Thermophilic treatment is well suited for high-strength waste, like animal waste, and Iowa State already has a research initiative in this area.”

An opportunity to conduct outstanding research at Iowa State is obviously one of the main reasons Alleman chose to accept the position here. But there were many other reasons as well, including the chance to actually lead a department for the first time. Plus, he liked the fact that a majority of the faculty in his department are registered engineers, something that wasn’t true at Purdue University, where Alleman taught for more than 20 years. Less than one-third of the faculty in his department there were registered.

One of Alleman’s immediate goals at Iowa State is to help his department promote itself. “We don’t sell ourselves the way we need to,” he says. “The construction engineering program is a good example. We’re the largest program with more than 300 undergraduates, and arguably one of the best in the United States, but I think we can do a better job of letting people know that.

“We also have one of the highest passing rates in the country on the Fundamentals of Engineering exam that students take after graduation,” he continues. “We’re around 95 percent, making us head and shoulders above other programs in the country.”

Someday soon, he hopes, every potential civil, construction, and environmental engineering student in the nation will know that fact and take a closer look at Iowa State University.