Wayant Billey regularly drives more than an hour for drinking water.
For Billey, a 33-year-old Navajo student from the Standing Rock community in New Mexico, water quality is not an abstract research question. It is part of daily life.
“I live about maybe 10 miles off the road … I don’t really have the amenities that a lot of people have, such as having running water and a reliable heating source. So, I do a lot of water hauling on my day-to-day basis,” says Billey.
Many families in his area haul water for drinking, livestock and crops, often from sources that may not be safe to consume. Billey has seen how deeply those concerns shape life on the reservation. Now, through his research at Navajo Technical University, he is working on tools that could help communities better understand what is in their water.
Billey is a B.S. student in chemistry at Navajo Technical University, where he works in the lab of Thiagarajan Soundappan, associate professor in NTU’s School of Science and PI for PREM VENTURES — a collaboration between NTU and Harvard University.
Billey’s research focuses on small, low-cost electrochemical sensors made with laser-induced graphene, or LIG, a porous carbon material created by laser-engraving polymer film. The sensors are designed to detect contaminants such as heavy metals, including arsenic, cadmium, lead and copper.
PREM VENTURES
NSF PREM VENTURES will build pathways for Native American students in STEM, from K-12 to graduate school, and address research areas that are important to the Navajo Nation, such as monitoring of abandoned mines, agriculture, elder care, manufacturing and veterinary care.