What do government and corrosion have in common? This isn’t a joke at the expense of Congress, which is about to adjourn for summer recess. Instead, it’s a serious question. Corrosion, when left unchecked, costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year.
Enter Lara Ojha, a rising fourth-year University of Virginia in the Materials Science and Engineering Department. She and three other students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science visited Congress during the spring to provide information advocacy for why their subfields of study are important to support.
Ojha, who plans to repeat the process again in 2025, spoke to UVA Engineering about what she shared with the elected officials.
Q. We understand that Capitol Hill has an open house event each year for you to come and pitch them, right?
A. Yes, in the spring. At that point in the season, they were beginning to go through appropriations. So that means they've passed a budget. But now they actually have to fund all of the things that they said they were going to put money towards, and there's never enough money for everything. So lobbyists and people from all over the country come in to speak to their representatives to say, “You should give money to this specific initiative.”
Material Advantage, which is the national professional organization for materials science engineers, was one of the many groups from across the country that got students to come and talk to senators and representatives about funding materials science research and education.
Q. Can you address why corrosion in general is a major concern?
A. Corrosion is a really big deal. When people ask what kind of research I do, I say, “I study corrosion,” and then they ask, “Why would you study that?” I tell them that the cost of replacing infrastructure represents about 3% of the U.S. gross domestic product. That's according to a survey from 2014. So that’s billions of dollars. And, Worldwide, it’s billions of dollars as well.
Corrosion represents a constant cost for the United States government. But unlike things like natural disasters, we can control corrosion. It's something that's worth investing energy and money into trying to prevent.
They're actually losing quite a bit of money because they're being forced to retire parts of their fleet early.
One of the things that we brought up when we were on Capitol Hill is that the new naval budget doesn't really have a lot of room for corrosion research funding, so they're being forced to retire ships early, because they don't have much funding to do this research and figure out if they can extend the lifetime or replace certain parts but not others.
They're actually losing quite a bit of money because they're being forced to retire parts of their fleet early.
Q. What is the secret to getting elected officials to care?
A. It may seem like a jump to connect materials science to politics, but everything is made of materials. Policy-makers are in charge of creating infrastructure. If we can make better materials more cheaply, infrastructure costs will decrease, and they like that.
In my case, I do research on corrosion that mostly impacts the Navy or NASA. For example, helping make sure that naval ships don't crack. Helping the Navy predict when different parts of their ships need to be replaced is not only an economic concern, but it’s also very important for the nation's protection. We hope that our policy-makers are interested in safety and protection, too.
Q. What else do you wish people knew about MSE?
A. It’s a very interesting discipline that a lot of people don't really know about as an entity on its own. And I think it's a great example of an interdisciplinary engineering degree. We take fundamental concepts from physics and chemistry, and then also take principles from civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and aerospace engineering.
So that's the thing — you can keep adding disciplines. You draw from this; you draw from that. Essentially, we're looking at why materials behave the way they do. And then, understanding that, how do we solve problems and build the materials to behave better?
For example, I also have a project on the International Space Station that’s helping ensure the safety of the astronauts. I’ve been working in the lab of professor James T. Burns in the Materials Science Engineering Department. The ISS has been experiencing some cracking on the interior of the Russian module. I’ve been doing testing on samples under different environmental conditions to help figure out why.
Another student is doing semiconductor research. There’s a lot of heat in semiconductors so materials really matter. Someone else is doing aerospace research — trying to create high temperature ceramics that are more resistant, so that planes can go faster. And then the fourth person was talking about lithium-ion batteries and their integration into electric vehicles.