The Curious President
By Curious President
The Curious PresidentSep 16, 2022
The trouble with tailings: How a team at NAIT is working to reclaim land disturbed by oil sands tailings ponds
Oil sands tailings are the by-product of the extraction process used to separate the oil from sand and clay. For safety and regulatory purposes, these tailings are stored in massive dam and dyke systems called tailing ponds.
Managing tailing ponds safely and sustainably continues to be one of the biggest challenges of the oil sands. Tailing leaks can have disastrous consequences on the environment and local populations.
A team at NAIT’s Centre for Oil Sands Sustainability, led by Doctor Heather Kaminsky, is working on ways to transform these liquid tailing ponds into a manageable environment that would support plant growth.
We wade into all the ways they are looking to achieve their goal on this episode of The Curious President.
Learning to Fly: A grad's business takes off with help from the NAIT network
Launching a company is no easy task. Even if you have a great idea, you still need a plan, financing, and maybe most of all you need access to expertise and mentorship to help guide your vision. In this episode of the Curious President we talk with Shelvie Fernan (Bachelor of Business Administration '18, Marketing '16) who had an idea for an international shipping company based on her experiences as an immigrant. To turn the idea into a business, Shelvie got help from the Mawji Centre at NAIT, which opened a vast network of support. Find out how it happened on this episode of The Curious President.
Creativity in the Classroom: How innovation in teaching is preparing students for careers
For more than 60 years NAIT’s polytechnic education has provided students with the skills they need to find meaningful careers. During that time, there has been an awful lot of change. The skills required 60 years ago are not often the same skills required today, and the skills of today may not be the skills required tomorrow. To provide the best possible polytechnic education instructors at NAIT are constantly innovating and honing their craft.
Find out how they do it on this episode of The Curious President.
Note: These interviews were recorded in video form too. Watch them on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SOt5l-DNOM
From India to NAIT: An international student’s pandemic journey to Canada
Travel is stressful during even the best times, but for international students starting at NAIT in the early days of the pandemic the ever-changing travel restrictions made it that much harder. Thankfully, staff at NAIT stepped up and developed the Travel Project – a program to help international students like Bhadresh Chaudhari navigate all the COVID rules and regulations so they could travel safely to Edmonton and pursue their NAIT education.
How did it happen? How did it go? Find out on this episode of The Curious President.
Scouring the Sask: One NAIT research team’s quest to measure microplastic waste in Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River
Plastic is everywhere. From the depths of the Mariana Trench to the top of Mount Everest – no place is too remote for plastic waste. And that includes your body. Microplastics – fragments of plastic less than 5 mm in length and often invisible to the human eye – have pervaded everything from the water we drink, to the food we eat. It was recently discovered that most of us have microplastics in our blood streams. This has health implications that we still don’t fully understand.
And yet, plastics aren't going away. Plastic is an essential material for many industries. It’s used in practically every product we buy. We simply must manage plastic waste better.
The first step in managing microplastics is to measure them. And that’s exactly what a team at NAIT is doing by pulling samples out of Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River.
What did they find? What did they learn? Find out on this episode of … The Curious President.
Links:
If you would like to learn more about the Plastics Research in Action initiative, join NAIT and Heartland Polymers, Inter Pipeline’s polypropylene brand, on November 17 from 9-10:30 a.m. MT, for their annual update. Please visit www.nait.ca/pria for more information and to register for the event.
Education and electricity: How NAIT helped bring light and power to a school high in the Peruvian Andes
In Spring 2022 students and instructors from NAIT’s Alternative Energy Technology Program travelled to a remote Peruvian village called Ccollpapata. They went there to install off-grid solar energy with the help of Light Up the World, an Alberta-based charity. At Ccollpapata, NAIT students learned how to work in a different country, for people who speak a different language, with limited resources, under a tight deadline, at an extreme elevation. And in the end, they brought life-changing electricity to a local school so kids there could learn from the same technology and get the same education as their peers.
How’d it happen? We’ll find out in this premier episode ... of the Curious President.
Links
Read more about this story on Techlifetoday
Watch Light Up The World's video from Ccollpapata
Learn more about NAIT's Alternative Energy Technology program