Aaron Blake uses engineering to protect wild lands

Senior Aaron Blake at Cornell Outdoor Education's Hoffmann Challenge Course. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By Lissa Harris

Aaron Blake is an engineer with a mission. An avid backpacker, kayaker, climber and skier since childhood, he has brought a deep love of the wilderness to his major in civil and environmental engineering. "I'd like to do work that is environmentally significant," he said.

Blake already has done much of this kind of work. As a Presidential Scholar, he has worked on the Lake Ontario Biocomplexity Project as part of a team studying the way water flows through the lakeshore's bays and lagoons.

Few problems are more complex than trying to predict how moving water will behave. But, said Blake, the study of fluid mechanics is a powerful tool for looking at how pollution spreads through the environment.

"Any kind of contaminant is transported by fluids. The atmosphere is a fluid flow," he said. "Environmental fluid mechanics determines contaminant transport, basically, and that's what I got interested in."

Early on, Blake became involved in engineering through his interest in environmental conservation and alternative energy. As a seventh grader in rural New Hampshire, he took part in the Junior Solar Sprint, a competition for miniature solar cars (See related picture from this issue). But by the time he got to high school, he was hungry for bigger projects.

"There was a group of us who had worked on the Junior Solar Sprint, and we went to see the principal and told him we really wanted to compete in the Tour de Sol, which is the famous solar and alternative-energy vehicles race that goes up and down the East Coast," said Blake. "He said, 'We don't have any facilities, we don't have any advisers, we don't have any money, but you can use the phone in my office and I'll support you how I can.'"

Blake and his classmates wrote $30,000 worth of grants to fund the creation of the "Sunbunny," a solar-powered vehicle built from a donated Volkswagen Rabbit with a blown head gasket. The construction site -- a barn -- was lent to the students by a local farmer, who moved his manure spreader to make room for the team.

The team competed in the Tour de Sol, and the experience, Blake believes, is what got him into the Cornell engineering program.

Blake's enthusiasm for tough engineering problems has not faded. According to his adviser, Todd Cowen, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, Blake -- who started taking graduate-level classes in his sophomore year -- has taken "more 600-level courses than probably any other student in the program."

But Blake also has made time to pursue an abiding love of the outdoors, becoming involved with Cornell Outdoor Education as a freshman and teaching more than 30 physical education classes in climbing, paddling and skiing.

Now he is ready to move on, probably "out west," working in water resource engineering or watershed management. "Big mountains, big rivers, big rocks, less people," he grinned.