Brian Haggard, associate professor of biological engineering, has taught at the University of Arkansas since 2006, when he received the opportunity to teach while working on his masters in environmental science. Haggard has taught biological engineering design studio and his interest in environmental science grew while he working on watersheds and studying water quality.
“I came to this type of work when I was working with watersheds, water quality, so my interest turned to ecological hydrology,” he said.
How I got into engineering
Haggard began his college career as a student athlete seeking a degree in engineering before setting his sights on bioengineering. Once he got involved with environmental consulting, he earned a master’s in environmental science and a doctorate in engineering.
Shortly after graduating, Haggard started working for the Federal Government USGS, Department of Agriculture, as a Hydrologist.
University of Arkansas experience
When I came to the University of Arkansas, “I was working on my masters in 1997. It felt like home, so I took the opportunity,” he said. “The USDA, that I was working for beforehand, was in Fayetteville.
“For someone in this field, the location is premiere: the outdoors, the community tie to the water, locations like Devils Den, Beaver Lake and surrounding streams” are all beneficial for this type of study.
Although Haggard always had a love of the outdoors, he was in the majority of students that had difficulty making the connection between the classroom and physical, outdoor projects. A college mentor, Emily Stanley, bridged this gap and inspired him to experience engineering first-hand by getting out of the lab.
She helped change his perspective of engineering.
“Emily Stanley is a limnologist at the Center of Limnology, University of Wisconsin, and she was on my PhD committee,” he said. “She taught me how to write, how to think. She taught me to get out, to get in the water.”
As a teacher, Haggard mirrors Stanley by encouraging his students to do one simple thing to become a better engineer. “Our department encourages students to get out and get a feel for it. Drive to it and see it,” he said. “It helps with understanding.”
As before, students are still most comfortable in the classroom and in the lab.
“When I was teaching a class on stream flow, I gave them an assignment involving multiple points of a creek and they had to figure out why it was higher and flowed more quickly at certain points,” he said. “Once I started grading the assignment, I realized that no one drove out to the creek, which was not far from campus.”
Research
Haggard is Director of the Arkansas Water Resource Center. To learn more about their projects and staff, visit http://www.uark.edu/depts/awrc/.
“At the Arkansas Water Resource Center, our main focus water. We take samples from 20 sites in Northwest Arkansas to create long-term databases by monitoring water quality change over time,” he said.
This center is working on a number of water quality projects at the moment. One project monitors the White River, which drains into Beaver Lake, pulling water from a different source into our local water supply.
Another AWRC endeavor focuses on the discharge in the Illinois River Basin, estimating the total maximum daily load, or TMDL, of pollutants into the stream. “Here, we create a load estimate in kilograms of nitrogen, sediment and phosphorous.”
At the Arkansas Water Resource Center, “We partner with Oklahoma State University, which has a gravel alluvium, (that enables) quick transport for phosphorous.”
Currently, the largest, all-inclusive project at the center is a multi-organization endeavor for evaluating Arkansas Natural Resources.
“This is involving Arkansas Game & Fish commission, who are studying the fish of the area in this case; the University of Central Arkansas, whose researchers are studying the invertebrates and then our Biological Engineering Department researchers are studying the habitat,” he said.
For the University of Arkansas, that means “studying the effect of drills on streams in places like the south fork of the Little Red River—scenic areas,” as well as a region where streams and rivers cross multiple states (the Three Kings River that flows from Arkansas to Missouri) and Fayetteville Shale areas.
“The center has been collecting water samples in streams draining multiple trans-boundary watersheds, and then getting those analyzed in its fee–based lab,” Haggard said. “Several specific studies on water quality have also been completed looking at the effects of municipal effluent discharges, hydrology and land use changes on water quality.”
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