This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Water, waste, and reuse with Dr. Sybil Sharvelle.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.
Sybil Sharvelle: I think that’s a huge driver for me and the types of research that I like to engage in is to feel like there may be impact in this century with respect to actual implementation.
Jocelyn Hittle: Welcome to Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado.
Sybil Sharvelle: Core to my interest in that area was this concept of closed loop recycling systems, and so that’s where I’ve really been able to establish this interest in our urban systems of thinking about how we can close that loop.
Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, associate Vice Chancellor of the CSU Sport campus. Today I’m joined by Dr. Sybil sve, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University. Her research interests include water reuse, urban water management and converting waste to energy. Dr. Sve received a master’s in civil engineering from the University of Colorado and a PhD from Purdue University where her research involved design of a method for simultaneous treatment of graywater and waste gas. And I know we’ll talk more about that through our conversation today. Welcome, Dr. Charl.
Sybil Sharvelle: Well, thank you for having me.
Jocelyn Hittle: Thanks for being here. So we’ve talked on this podcast with a few professors in previous episodes, so any longtime listeners or people who are familiar with academia will know something about the life of a professor. I’ll take a stab at you have some of your time focused on teaching, some of your time focused on research and some on the day-to-day administration of making all that happen both and long-term projects. So let’s maybe take these one at a time. Can you tell me a little bit about your teaching? What are you teaching right now?
Sybil Sharvelle: Okay, sure. So I have two primary classes that I teach in our department. One of those is on biological wastewater treatment, so that’s kind of a traditional class on how to design systems that are biological in nature that achieve removal of contaminants from wastewater, so our municipal wastewaters or industrial, but primarily focusing on kind of municipal wastewater treatment there. The other class that I teach for our department that I haven’t taught in a couple of years, and I’ll explain that in just a bit, is a class on sustainable water and waste management where I really kind of take a survey view of all of the different innovations in food, energy, water systems and kind of sustainable technologies for management of those systems and cleaning water, cleaning, air handling waste, all of those kinds of things. So that’s a really fun class that I like to teach.
Sybil Sharvelle: Recently I’ve been teaching a few classes on food, energy, water connections that are part of our National Science Foundation interviews program. So that’s interdisciplinary training and research for graduate education and food energy water systems. And that was again funded by the National Science Foundation. And so I’ve taught a couple of classes that are very interdisciplinary that reach students from College of Liberal Arts, college of Engineering, college of Natural Sciences, college of Agriculture, and kind get all these students together to look at how we can solve food, energy, water problems and resource allocation problems related to those.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great. So for those classes you called it, which is sort of interdisciplinary is where the inter comes from, and then F is food, E is
Sybil Sharvelle: Energy,
Jocelyn Hittle: Energy,
Sybil Sharvelle: Water
Jocelyn Hittle: Is water. So you could have students who are really focused on the food part of it or an English major sounds like who might be interested in sort of this interdisciplinary work, correct. In that class?
Sybil Sharvelle: Correct. Yeah, that’s a really fun challenge I think because students come from these very different backgrounds, be it from more technical backgrounds or we get a lot of students, for example in social sciences and policy that are interested in food energy topics but don’t necessarily have the technical background that our engineering students or science students may come with.
Jocelyn Hittle: Sure. So like a political science major, for
Sybil Sharvelle: Example, political science is a good example of students that we’ve had in those classes. And they really want to do things like addressing policy related to food, energy, water management. And so they want to gain a better understanding of the whole system and the systems thinking that goes along with that. So we do have these very different disciplines. Even within disciplines, we often have, for example, maybe a mechanical engineer that’s very focused on energy systems or a civil environmental engineer that may be very focused on water systems. So that class really gets everyone up to speed on each food, energy and water and the problems associated with those and their interconnections. And then we get all of the students up to speed on technical challenges and considerations, social and social environmental justice issues related to food, energy, water management, and then economics. And then we also even go into carbon footprint related to food, energy, water resource allocations. So everyone in the class probably feels like some part of the class is very familiar to them and that much of the class is not familiar. They really have fun working in groups together to address some of these issues.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s interesting. It seems to model what their work life might be like potentially. You don’t necessarily only work with people who have the same technical expertise as you once you’re in the working world.
Sybil Sharvelle: That’s an excellent point, Jocelyn. And I think that that’s really a big driver for why we wanted to develop. This was a newly developed class in the last couple years. And when we look at skills that 21st century job skills, so those are the skills that have been identified by industry and even academia for skills that they want students to have and to be really trained in. It really has to do with some of these interdisciplinary teams and working in teams where you may not be the most familiar with a certain topic. So it certainly gets students a little bit out of their comfort zone, but in a way that I think our students have really appreciated and enjoyed.
Jocelyn Hittle: And I would guess it teaches some of those soft skills as well that employers are interested in, which might include things like how do you deal with being in an uncomfortable situation and manage it professionally, and how do you understand what you bring to the table and how do you leverage other people’s skills? There’s a lot there.
Sybil Sharvelle: So the students that are funded through our program actually get extra training on those. We offer workshops and training sessions on those kind of soft skills on team science, however they get chances to actually practice those in the class. And students that are not funded through our program also take these classes and they also obtain those skills just through the practical experiences in the classroom. But yeah, it does really do that. And we provide also in those classes, tools, that kind of systems thinking tools and approaches like one that we call one of those that we call is a driver pressure state impact response framework, which is D-P-S-I-R. Some people call it DIP sir. But anyway, that’s a tool that we give that we teach to the students that helps them to work together in teams. And it’s also often used in environments to gain kind of garner stakeholder support from very different perspectives on problems. And so it’s a tool that I think they can also use a lot in practice.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s great, and thanks. We’re taking a little bit of a deeper dive into that class. I think it’s really interesting and it sounds like it is maybe not as common or maybe it’s becoming more common to have these more interdisciplinary kinds of academic experiences for young people. And at Spur, obviously we’re really interested in how do we bring disciplines together in pursuit of solutions to big challenges. I think we really need a lot of different perspectives at the table to be effective. So really interested in how that class has been going. Could you give us an example of a problem that those students might be solving particularly because my guess is that a listener might not think of food, energy and water as necessarily connected. Can you give us an example of how they are?
Sybil Sharvelle: Great. So for example, so the students have kind of a semester project, so I’m thinking of some of those that are just topping out to me. One group of students, for example, worked on a project where they were looking at Weld County and the large oil and gas development that’s there and understanding the impacts to the food production industry. Also understanding some of the social environmental justice issues associated with that, with some of these facilities coming in near to people’s neighborhoods and kind of what the impact was across the agricultural sector, what the benefit is to the energy sector, and then all the connections with the water that might be used in that process as well, and the impact that that has. So they really take a deep dive into understanding each the food, energy and water systems associated with that problem. And then they look at it through the lens of economics, social, environmental justice, and really trying to provide technical solutions that bring together all of those considerations in mind as we consider kind of the holistic impacts of solutions that might be put forward there.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great. Okay. Thank you for that example. And I think that might take us a little bit in the direction of the research that you do. So let’s move on to that area of your work as a professor at CSU. Tell us a little bit about your research.
Sybil Sharvelle: I would broadly describe my research in the area of resource recovery. I do a lot of work with water reuse and efficient use of water in our urban systems. Also do a lot of work on recovering nutrients and energy products from different waste materials. Those waste materials can range anything from say animal feeding, operation, manure to yard waste and food waste that might be collected in an urban area or wastewater that could be generated by a city or industry. So really looking at how can we recover all the valuable products from that material. So really kind of broad area of research I think, and going in these different directions. But there is this focal point that brings everything together, which is about recovering resources, whether that’s taking water and being able to reuse it or obtaining valuable products from our waste materials.
Jocelyn Hittle: So what’s an example of a valuable product you might be able to pull from a waste material?
Sybil Sharvelle: Okay, so I’ll go with the energy example first. So for example, we can take organic matter that’s in waste material. So if we go back to the animal feeding operation manure, that’s very high organic content material. If we put that into a reactor that and we don’t add oxygen and create these anaerobic conditions, then we can collect methane from that reactor and that can then serve as a renewable natural gas source. And that’s an area that’s really booming right now because of a lot of the new policy, especially in California with respect to renewable natural credits and the value of those. So we’re really starting to see a lot more methane capture from animal manure, but kind of taking that to the next level. We have a project funded by Department of Energy right now where we are looking at generating volatile fatty assets from those waste materials.
Sybil Sharvelle: So similar concept, same kind of reactor where we don’t add oxygen and create these anaerobic conditions. In this example, now we stop the biological reaction before methane is produced and try to form these volatile fatty acids. Those have very high value in a lot of different markets. They can be used to make fuels and even are highly considered for sustainable aviation fuels, but they also can be used to make plastics. They’re used in some dietary supplements, for example. And so the amount that you can get paid per a small mass of those volatile fatty acids is much more potentially than methane. So that’s kind of a direction of future research, where we’re going, where we’re not. We have a lot of the methane production facilities already in place and even in Colorado, the volatile fatty acids kind of a new innovation that’s kind of forthcoming and where we’re looking at developing some innovations there.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s great. Thank you for that summary. So what about your research has you most excited right now? What’s maybe leading edge or gets you out of bed in the morning?
Sybil Sharvelle: Sure. I think I’ve always been driven by making systems more efficient and kind of this circular economy and recirculation of materials and things like that. So anything related to that always gets me out of bed every morning. But I think right now things excite me. Most are ways to beneficially use stormwater. That’s an area that’s growing a lot right now and showing a lot of opportunity both in terms of how much water actually can become available, and then this concept of using that water locally. And I’m seeing a lot of change in regulation and policy that’s being more enabling and just a lot of national scale interest in that practice. So that’s something that I’m really finding exciting right now. This project on volatile fatty acids I think is also one that’s really exciting me right now because I think there’s just so many opportunities to garner these products that have a lot of value and really make use of every part of waste, and we can also extract the nitrogen and phosphorus and make use of those for fertilizers. So I just see a lot of potential opportunity there and that it may be something that’s kind of a game changer. It’s been a challenge to kind of financially make profitable these projects with methane generation, and I see this direction with the volatile fatty acids as a way that may break some of those barriers and really be able to harness more resource from our waste.
Jocelyn Hittle: Sure, yeah. So part of the role of scientific research at universities is to develop the basic science that can then or complicated science. Typically people say basic science, but it’s not basic at all. Really complicated science to do the science that then enables a change in the way people do business and what you’re describing, if you had a great scientific discovery that was really expensive, no one would ever be able to do it. So that has to be a layer that you put on all of these things is how do you make it financially make sense for a farmer to use the waste that they’re generating or to try to reclaim some kind of resource out of that waste. It has to be economically sensible for them to do that. And it sounds like that’s the direction you’re going. The idea of having a source for sustainable aviation fuel is really exciting
Sybil Sharvelle: In particular. Yeah, absolutely. And for me it’s really important to feel like my research will have impact. So I tend toward research on topics that I think have potential. Now definitely I’ve gone down the track of researching things and figuring out that, well, that didn’t have as much potential as what I thought, but I at least need to know that that potential exists and I lose interest once I find out that perhaps maybe that potential isn’t what I thought it might be. But I think that’s a huge driver for me in the types of research that I like to engage in, is to feel like there may be impact in this century with respect to actual implementation. With that research on the volatile fatty acids, it’s one where we kind of come across a lot of technical challenges. We’re doing something new and every week we’re in my office, we have a group at CSU of about eight of us that are working on this project, and we’re all just banging our heads against the wall almost every week trying to figure out how to solve whatever new problem has come up in that research.
Sybil Sharvelle: And that’s fun, but it’s also really motivating that we are doing something that can potentially have some impact
Jocelyn Hittle: When you’re beating your head against the wall, that there’s a reason that you’re putting yourself through that particular painful moment. There’s an Edison quote around, I didn’t fail 900. He took 10,000 tries to invent the light bulb, and he said, I just figured out 9,999 ways it don’t work. So some of those paths that you’ve been down where you’re like, ah, this isn’t going to work now. Right. That’s important. That’s an important part of scientific discovery as well.
Sybil Sharvelle: It happens a lot.
Jocelyn Hittle: It does more often than not. So let’s talk a little bit about the urban water piece. So you mentioned stormwater, which for those who may not be familiar with that terminology is water that falls on our cities and on the land and sort of runs off into you have a big rain event, you have a big storm and it runs off into our waterways. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about the urban water system. My guess is most folks don’t really think that much about how water works in a city. Maybe you could expand on that a little bit and what’s particularly interesting to you in that space right now?
Sybil Sharvelle: That’s a big one. So storm water I think is an important part of our urban water system. If we kind of want to divide our water into different areas, we have water, our source water that typically we would take from either a reservoir or some type of river or flowing stream or something where we’re collecting that water and treating it and turning it into drinking water. Then we use it in our homes, industries, commercial spaces and generate wastewater that’s handled at a wastewater treatment plant. So there’s kind of this whole draw of water from our natural water supplies and then use of that water and then discharge of that water after treatment back to return to our natural systems. Then we add onto that the stormwater piece, which you just described very well, where we’re collecting precipitation runoff that happens in an urban area, trying to implement or put into place technologies that can improve quality of that before it also returns back to our natural systems and is discharged to waterways.
Sybil Sharvelle: Where I really see the opportunities is to think more about how we can get away from this concept of taking water from outside our system, making use of it, and then discharging it out of the system and how we can use water more locally within our system. So maybe that’s taking the stormwater that falls in our cities and making use of that within those local areas. Maybe that’s taking wastewater that we generate in the buildings and treating that to a quality that we could make use of it in a neighborhood or a district or something like that, or just even within the entire city and just really trying. Maybe it’s taking gray water, for example. So which is water from just showers, laundry machines and hand washing. So a little bit cleaner than our municipal wastewater and figuring out ways that we can make use of that to create more green space in the city and meet some of our demands for water like toilet flushing, irrigation, and even potentially treating those waters to drinkable quality.
Jocelyn Hittle: Those are great examples. Thanks. And here at CSU Spur in the hydro building where you and I are sitting right now, we have a number of those things that you have helped us to develop and inform the design of this building so that we can do some additional research on those options. So we have gray water capture from some of our hand washing sinks, and that can be used in research that you all as part of the One Water Solutions Institute are helping to lead. We also capture runoff from our roof and use it to irrigate a portion of our landscaping here. Of course, all of that. We have very complicated water law here in Colorado, so any water lawyers listening, just know that we have gotten all of the right things in place in order to make that match with what is legally required here. But it’s a great opportunity for us to better understand and showcase different ways to use different sources of water. So you’re part of the One Water Solutions Institute. Maybe you can say a little bit more about what’s the mission and what are some of the ongoing activities of that group right now?
Sybil Sharvelle: Great. So One Water Solutions Institute is very outward facing institute that is really working to bring our innovations in water and water management into practice. So providing real world solutions using world-class research, and that’s really kind of the driving force of the One Water Solution Institute or the driving mission of the One Water Solutions Institute is to bring some of this top class research that we’re doing on water systems and making those more efficient into practice by working with utilities, practitioners and implementers of these technologies and practices. So really core to our mission is collaboration with all of those different entities.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great, thanks. Okay, so we have hit on a number of different aspects of your job. The teaching, that interdisciplinary piece, which is so great to hear about and how that is similar in some ways to the work that you’re doing. On the research side, you have interdisciplinary groups as well, and the One Water Solutions Institute has some interdisciplinary components to it as well. All in all that your day is varied. I’m guessing there is probably not a typical day for you, but you might have some moments in your day that pretty consistently are moments where you feel like, you know what? I’m good at this job. When you have those moments where you feel good about what you’re contributing and what you’re doing, what has just happened? What’s the context?
Sybil Sharvelle: So I’m thinking two things are coming to mind for me, and actually one is related to teaching and mentorship of students, and one is related to my research. So I’ll start with the teaching and mentorship of students, and I would say that for me, when I really feel good and rewarded is when I see students doing better at something. And that could be in my classes or students that I’m mentoring on research projects or that I’m interacting with, but when I see them improve and provide a better product that really makes me feel good about what I’m doing. It’s just a direct impact. And students always surprise me on how much they can engage and learn and how open they are to changing their ways and doing things differently and how much impact we can have on their learning. When it comes to kind of more my research and professional work, the things that have been most rewarding for me have been when I see some of the work that I’ve done be put into practice particularly, one example I’m thinking of is some work that we’ve done on recommendations for water quality targets, for fit for purpose water.
Sybil Sharvelle: So I’ll explain what I mean by fit for purpose water and then get back to the regulatory piece. So fit for purpose water is, I describe it as right water for the right use. So it’s treating water to the quality that’s appropriate for the end use. And we can think about multiple different source waters. We’ve talked already about many of those different source waters and then end uses that vary from simple landscape irrigation, toilet flushing, all the way to potable quality. So it’s treating the water to the right quality for the right use. So when I get back to the regulatory piece of that, it’s been very complex for regulators to think about how do we set water quality targets for all of these different water sources and all of these different water uses and make those appropriate so that we can actually cheap fit for purpose water. And so we’ve done a lot of work on what treatment requirements are needed across those different source water and use combinations and providing some guidance on levels of treatment needed for the different source water use requirements. And that’s just been really rewarding when I’ve seen some of that actually come into practice in different state regulations.
Jocelyn Hittle: Again, that application piece, but in a different place than a lot of people might think of when you’re thinking about engineering, you’re actually influencing policy ultimately,
Sybil Sharvelle: And that was not something I ever expected going into my career. I
Jocelyn Hittle: Love it. That surprise. So on the flip side of, okay, these are the moments where you feel really rewarded in what you’re doing, are there some tasks that you currently have to do that you just dislike?
Sybil Sharvelle: I think every professor will tell you they don’t like grad ink. It’s fair. It’s just not fun. But every job comes with some administrative pieces and keeping up with details on a lot of different things. And those are pieces that are just not fun. But if you don’t stay on top of things, really get out of control fast. So I think everyone,
Jocelyn Hittle: Words of wisdom, yes, stay on the details or things get out of control
Sybil Sharvelle: Fast. It happens fast, and then you can’t achieve what you’re seeking to achieve from the more scientific and research perspectives because everything is failing because you didn’t take care of the details with the budgets and all of those other things. So it’s really critical to stay on top of all those things. That’s something I’ve definitely learned throughout my career and not the favorite part of the job at all, but something that I really seek to stay on top of.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great. Okay. Next question for you in this vein, when you come up against a challenge in your work, whether in any of the various buckets of work you do, teaching, research, whichever administration, who do you call for help? If anyone?
Sybil Sharvelle: I don’t know if I ever call anyone
Jocelyn Hittle: Or text or email, whichever your form of communication. Is there a team? Well, it sounds like you work in teams a lot, so maybe what’s more common is something a challenge comes up in a team environment and you work on it together.
Sybil Sharvelle: Okay. Yeah. So there’s two different kinds of challenges. So let’s talk a little bit about the science challenges and then some of the administrative challenges. So science challenges, it does really help to work in teams and really that interaction between different people and getting different people’s thoughts and perspectives on a problem is very useful. So I’m kind of thinking about the project that I described on the volatile fatty acid production and I explained all the issues we’re having with that project in terms of coming up with technical problems and things that we have to overcome in the research and early phases of that project. Our team wasn’t meeting as frequently and we were hitting a lot of roadblocks, and as soon as we started adding kind of longer time span meetings and more frequent, the level of progress and the excitement and the enthusiasm and the innovations that have come are just so much more. So I think in general, when I come across a problem, getting a team of people to think about that is really key. When I think of who do I call when I have administrative problems, it’s Sarah be of our One Water Solutions Institute because she helps us with coordinating teams, which is really important. Again, like I said, with solving issues and just getting all the right people at the table to solve various problems. And she’s just amazing at coming up with new ways to solve some of these hurdles that we come across administratively.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yep. It’s always good to have someone who can think creatively about those pieces. Okay. So first spur of the moment question for you. If you were not doing this job, what would you be doing?
Sybil Sharvelle: Okay, so I grew up wanting to be an astronaut and I don’t think I would be being amazing. I don’t think I’d be being an astronaut right now, even though I did grow up wanting to do that. But I feel like that was one career path that was really exciting for me was to have some kind of involvement with NASA and the space program and to be engaged in research and development that contributes to the space program. So that is maybe the job that I might have.
Jocelyn Hittle: Might have been. Yeah. So you’re anticipating our next direction of our conversation really well, so thanks. So maybe you can give us the broad brushstrokes of how you got here. Obviously maybe you started out thinking you wanted to be an astronaut and over time here you are, fill in some of the gaps there.
Sybil Sharvelle: Great. That’s a good question. So I did start out wanting to be an astronaut, and then as I kind of grew up, I also gained a really intimate desire to improve environment and I cared a lot, especially about water systems growing up in Indiana. We have rivers and streams everywhere, and I just was really interested in improvement of water quality in those rivers and streams and environmental improvement in general. So I had this kind of core desire from childhood and a passion for the space program and exploration that comes along with that. And then as I grew older, really realized this kind of connection to environment that I have. And I didn’t even going into undergraduate quite understand how I could ever connect those two things. But I decided to study environmental engineering with a focus on water and water quality. And then as I got into that program, I started to learn that there were all of these issues that the space program was dealing with respect to advanced life support and supporting humans on long duration space missions and Mars and missions to Mars and things like that.
Sybil Sharvelle: And so then I was able to find this really nice way to kind of meld together my passion and interest for the space program and exploration with some of these interests in environmental engineering and water systems and things like that in terms of how we can provide water during long duration space missions and how we can provide food during long duration space missions and things like that. So that led me into my graduate research where as Jocelyn described earlier, we were looking at ways to recycle water for long duration space missions. So that was just the perfect project fit for me. And I’ve not, the human space travel portion of NASA’s been a little bit more limited in the last decade, but as I kind of grew in my career, I recognize that kind of core to my interest in that area was this concept of closed loop recycling systems. And so that’s where I’ve really been able to establish this interest in our urban systems of thinking about how we can close that loop and make use of local resources and recycle waste streams within our local communities.
Jocelyn Hittle: That makes a ton of sense. It’s a different application of this closed loop approach. Was there anyone along the way who was particularly influential, maybe a professor or a mentor?
Sybil Sharvelle: One person I think of is Jay Garland, who is now A-U-S-C-P, a Environmental Protection Agency, and also I worked with at nasa. I think he shares a lot of similar passions with me and has just been someone that I’ve worked with and collaborated a lot with in my career. And because we share such similar interests and motivations for why we do what we do, it’s just been really amazing to work with him at nasa. And when I was doing that work on long duration space missions and then continue work with him where he’s now at U-S-C-P-A working more in this kind of regulatory piece where he’s also contributing to some of these things around regulatory processes that can foster fit for purpose water. And I’ve been able to continue to bounce ideas and approaches off of him throughout my career. That’s just been really rewarding to work with someone like that.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, those long-term relationships really can matter, and different chapters in both of your careers have intersected in different ways. That’s great. In that sort of broad brush strokes pathway you gave us any transitions there that were particularly difficult. What did you come up against as you were maybe pivoting slightly?
Sybil Sharvelle: One thing that comes to mind that is when I was almost done with, well about two to three years into my PhD program, that that program was funded by NASA to do advanced life support research, and it was also very interdisciplinary. We had people working on the food systems and how you would grow the food. We had nutritionists involved that were looking at the types of food that should be grown and how those should be managed, and looking at the water system and the air system and all of those different components, that was a really exciting project to be engaged in. About two to three years into my PhD program, NASA decided to cut the funding for that because they decided that they were not going to put as much resource into human space missions for different reasons. And that was definitely a hard thing for me, not because so much my own research funding was under threat, but more because I just thought that that was going to be my career pathway. I thought I was going to forever work on advanced life support and water recycling and recovery of resources for human space missions, and that was going to be what I did
Jocelyn Hittle: Because we would always be interested in sending people up on space missions. That’s what I thought. It was shocking that we stopped,
Sybil Sharvelle: Right. So there were so many challenges with that that were hard for me to take. And then as I went through that, I kind of did this deep dive and thought about, okay, well what is it that I want to do? And I don’t know that I ever actually decided. Another really influential person in my career has been Larry Rosner, who was a faculty at CSU when I got to CSU. And he had worked in practice for a long time. We share a lot of commonality and wanting to solve real world problems and doing kind of these applied research projects. And when I took a position at CSU, he happened to be working on graywater projects and asked me if I’d like to be engaged. And at that point I recognized how much I could take these concepts that I had been working on for advanced life support to support human space missions and apply those to solve issues here on earth, which I also have a lot of passion about.
Sybil Sharvelle: So that was a kind of low in my career when NASA made some of those decisions around their funding of their human space missions and programs. And it took, that was probably years that I was kind of struggling with that a little bit. I mean, I decided, I knew I wanted to go down the academic pathway, but I hadn’t really gained the passion for research that I had until I kind of connected with Larry Rosner and really saw how I could create a research program that puts into place these concepts around fit for purpose water and closed loop systems, which is very much been the focus of what I’ve done throughout my career here at CSU.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, it’s a constraint breeding creativity moment a little bit. Pivoting your existing area of work and knowledge and skillset into a slightly different area if memory serves. You also have a company that you have spun off of some of your research work. Could you tell us a little bit more about that and neglected to ask about it before?
Sybil Sharvelle: Yes. So that company is called Fluent Renewables. It is led primarily by a student of mine, Luke Lecher. This is kind of one of those rewarding moments for me to him to watch Luke grow in his career and how he has taken on this risk to develop this company that can implement some of our technologies. Working on this company’s focus is primarily on the resource recovery from waste materials. And we first really started down the track of the animal manure issue because that’s so big here in Colorado, but have more recently taken on food waste and municipal organic waste, like yard waste and any type of organic waste that could go into these systems and look at generating either methane or these valuable volatile fatty acid products that I talked about. So he has worked on taking some of the innovations that we’ve had in the lab and bringing those into the commercial space. And we’re working particularly with CSU Strata, who’s helped us a lot in developing the strategy for fluent renewables and how we would move forward and developing all the things that we need as a company. And through that process, Luke has learned a tremendous amount about entrepreneurship and what it takes, not just to innovate, but then to bring your innovation into practice. So that’s been a really fun experience as well. We don’t have a commercial product yet, but there’s a lot of nice opportunities out there right now.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great. And that really is sort of, again, the intersection of what does it take to make something that you’re working on in the research lab applied and functional and make people want to use it because it financially makes sense for them. So really interesting and it sounds like a great learning opportunity for you and your student as well. Yep. All right. So one last question for you. If you were going to give a 15-year-old some advice, some career advice, what would you say? And how about a 25-year-old,
Sybil Sharvelle: 15-year-old? I would give a 15-year-old the advice to be flexible and not too set in their minds about what they want to do. Find your passions. That’s a big thing. I think find the areas that you are passionate about, where you want to make a difference about something, and then seek career paths that enable you to do that, but realize that the first thing that you think about might not be the way that you are going to fulfill your passions. There’s a lot of different paths that we can take that all relate to our passions, and I think we had to be very flexible about how we do that. But keeping those kind of core passions there is I think, really effective for making us successful in our careers. For a 25-year-old, I would say don’t be afraid to take some risks. And risks are really different across different disciplines, and there’s different ways that we can take risks.
Sybil Sharvelle: I think for me, some of the risks that I took were more kind of putting my head out there and saying, I think that we really can do these fit for purpose technologies. And that sounds weird now because people are really embracing this concept of fit for purpose water and how we can be efficient with water use and use these different water sources. But when I first started at CSU 17 or 18 years ago, that was not the case. And I actually had people at conferences telling me I was going to kill someone by trying to implement these kinds of technologies because people were very set on the conventional way that we supplied water to systems, to households and to cities, and really saw a lot of risk in diverting from those conventional pathways. And there’s just been so much progress now, but I would say that don’t be afraid to say something that maybe people don’t want to hear or maybe don’t be afraid to take a financial risk a little bit to do something that you think that you can be passionate about.
Jocelyn Hittle: What about yourself at 25? What advice would you have given yourself?
Sybil Sharvelle: Oh, geez. I think I would’ve given myself, we already talked about this, I would’ve given myself advice to be more diligent about taking care of the details with my work and making sure that I stayed on top of budgets and administrative pieces and all the different communications and things like that.
Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. So that’s telling us that that was a lesson hard learned.
Sybil Sharvelle: That was a lesson hard learned. We all have them. Yes.
Jocelyn Hittle: Alright, last spur of the moment. Question for you. Do you drink tap water? I do. Is filtering necessary?
Sybil Sharvelle: Well, I filter my tap water because I don’t like the taste of the chlorine. Okay. It’s
Jocelyn Hittle: A taste preference more than you.
Sybil Sharvelle: The carbon filters filter the chlorine, and so yeah, I do like to use the filters because I don’t like the taste, so that’s just a taste thing. So our water is safe, but I do like to filter it because I prefer to not have the taste of chlorine in my water.
Jocelyn Hittle: Fair enough. Me either. Really, thank you so much, Dr. Dr.Sharvelle, for your time today. Really appreciate you joining me here on CSU Spur of the moment. Thank you for all you do here at Spur. All of the research and the teaching that you do to help inspire the next generation. You really, I know you care about making a difference. There’s no question you are on both fronts, so really appreciate you being here.
Sybil Sharvelle: Well, thank you, Jocelyn. This has been a fun experience.
Jocelyn Hittle: Thanks. The CSU Spur of the Moment Podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson, and our theme music is by kea. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.
