Case Study: The Great Lakes Research Center

“The Great Lakes Research Center (GLRC) provides state-of-the-art laboratories to support research on a broad array of topics. Faculty members from many departments across Michigan Technological University’s campus collaborate on interdisciplinary research, ranging from air–water interactions to biogeochemistry to food web relationships.” Its main purpose is to educate students, faculty, teachers, and others about the Great Lakes water basin. The Great Lakes Research Center has many education and outreach programs directed to all school-age children, teachers, and community members. Their Center for Science and Environmental Outreach has existed for almost twenty years. It reaches out to stakeholders locally, statewide, and across the entire Great Lakes region. Students, teachers, and the community are typically those who utilize this outreach program. The
They use creative new ways to develop equipment. Some examples of what they do include measuring long-term costal erosion monitoring to assessment of offshore wind energy potential. Because of the weather patterns Houghton experiences, projects for the warmer months differ from the projects for the colder months. Some warm-weather research the Marine Engineering and Technology research team is looking into includes: shoreline evolution prediction, algae plume transport and circulation, forensic analysis of aquatic accident sites, development of predictive models for the great lakes, turbulent marine boundary layer measurements and analysis, fate and transport prediction of biological and passive constituents, and underwater vehicles and autonomous control. Cold-weather research the team is looking into includes: the impact of wine, waves, and ice on offshore structures and costal instrumentation, the development of deep lake cabled observatories, and the navigation of under-ice