2025 Internship Project Overview

This summer I worked with nitrous oxide gas sensors to map out a soybean field over a monthlong period. Before starting the measurements, I added Arduino GPS and other environmental sensors such as soil temperature and moisture to the gas sensor, which were subsequently used during the measurement process. I also created a pipeline in Python for large amounts of data to be organized into spreadsheets to easily manage the large amounts of data from all the sensors. I created ways to visualize the data in MATLAB, which can represent our findings in meaningful ways. To take measurements, my research partner and I headed out to the soybean field daily to map it by walking in a grid-like pattern. We found over our monthlong study that the soybean field had areas of consistent localized nitrous oxide emissions.

 

ORGANIZATION/RESEARCH GROUP

Atmospheric Chemistry and Composition Group, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

LOCATION

Princeton, New Jersey

 

Interns

Angelina DiPaola ’28
Major: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Minor(s): Sustainable Energy
"I learned how lasers are used for environmental sensing and their wide applications. I loved the iterative nature of the research in which I was able to make decisions each week about where to focus my efforts, based on data collected the prior week."

Click to view the end-of-project presentation

 

Mark Zondlo
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Mentors

  • Lars Wendt, Research Manager, Princeton Materials Institute