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Technical communication is essential for a career in physics, but communication skills are often not explicitly taught in physics undergraduate curricula. As a starting point for curricular integration, we investigated where and how writing is currently occurring in the core undergraduate physics courses at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We examined course materials to identify where writing is explicitly or implicitly referenced, the genres that were assigned, and writing concepts that were represented. Analyzing course materials allowed us to identify a wide range of activities and assignments related to writing. We observed that implicit references to writing are prevalent, writing activities are weighted toward upper-level classes, and the most common genres are related to laboratory activities. Writing concepts that occurred frequently in upper-level laboratory courses correspond to disciplinary values of precision and clarity, while concepts of novelty and evidence were infrequent. This type of assessment can help identify gaps in the curriculum, allowing us to be more deliberate about how we develop students’ communication skills. 

Development of effective communication skills in engineering students is critical, yet challenging. As engineering programs are technically rigorous, work-intensive, and challenged by their high enrollment numbers, methods to improve students’ writing skills must be costeffective and scalable. This paper describes pedagogical changes and shares course materials designed to integrate core concepts from writing studies into an advanced laboratory-based civil engineering course. We incorporate language units developed by the Civil Engineering Writing Project that provide strong connections to professional engineers’ writing. Specific concepts that guided the redesign are genre awareness and flexibility, process orientation to writing, and global, prioritized feedback. Several semesters into the iterative implementation of these changes, teaching assistants observe greater student engagement, without an increase in teaching workload. 

Our work aims to support engineering and science faculty in adapting core concepts and best practices from writing studies and technical communication for their courses. We also study the effectiveness of varied supports, with an aim of improving the diffusion of effective pedagogies. Our Writing Across Engineering and Science (WAES) program includes a semester-long faculty learning community, followed by sustained mentoring, during which faculty and graduate students from our multidisciplinary team work with mentees to develop and implement new pedagogies and course materials. For graduate students, we developed an engineering course focused on engineering and science writing practices and pedagogies. This paper focuses on one key finding from our analysis: discussions about writing practices involving people from different disciplines often involve irregular and sporadic bumpiness through which foundational changes can emerge. We call this phenomenon discursive turbulence. In our experience, signs of discursive turbulence include affective intensity and co- existing contradictory beliefs. We share four examples to illustrate ways in which discursive turbulence appears, drawn from people with varying degrees and types of engagement with our transdisciplinary work: i) project team members, ii) a faculty mentee, iii) faculty who participated in a focus group on disciplinary writing goals, and iv) engineering graduate students who took our class on writing practice and pedagogy. Discursive turbulence now informs our mentoring approach. It can be generative as well as challenging. Importantly, it takes time to resolve, suggesting the utility of sustained mentoring during pedagogical change. 

Biocatalytic technologies are characterized by targeted, rapid degradation of contaminants over a range of environmentally relevant conditions representative of groundwater, but have not yet been integrated into drinking water treatment processes. This work investigated the potential for a hybrid ion-exchange/biocatalytic process, where biocatalysis is used to treat ion-exchange waste brine, allowing reuse of the brine. The reduction rates and the fate of the regulated anions perchlorate and nitrate were tested in synthetic brines and a real-world waste brine. Biocatalysts were applied as soluble protein fractions from Azospira oryzae for perchlorate reduction and Paracoccus denitrificans and Haloferax denitrificans for nitrate reduction. In synthetic 12% brine, the biocatalysts retained activity, with rates of 32.3 ± 6.1 U (μg Mo) −1 for perchlorate ( A. oryzae ) and 16.1 ± 7.1 U (μg Mo) −1 for nitrate ( P. denitrificans ). In real-world waste brine, activities were slightly lower (20.3 ± 6.5 U (μg Mo) −1 for perchlorate and 14.3 ± 3.8 U (μg Mo) −1 for nitrate). The difference in perchlorate reduction was due to higher concentrations of nitrate, bicarbonate, and sulfate in the waste brine. The predominant end products of nitrate reduction were nitrous oxide or dinitrogen gas, depending on the source of the biocatalysts and the salt concentration. These results demonstrate biocatalytic reduction of regulated anions in a real-world waste brine, which could facilitate brine reuse for the regeneration of ion-exchange technologies and prevent reintroduction of these anions and their intermediates into the environment.