Jennai Williams
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Latin professor is the life of the party
By Jennai Williams | October 22, 1999After lobbying in the 1970s, travelling around America as a magician and graduating from college in her 30s, Latin Professor Carla Goodnoh is now in her third year of teaching at Dartmouth. As a professor here, she sees bridging the gap between faculty and students as one of her key roles.
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Study: Corn to plastic process inefficient
By Jennai Williams | September 29, 1999Not all alternatives to using natural resources are actually conserving energy and reducing pollution, according to a study conducted by Tillman Gerngross, assistant professor of Biochemical Engineering at the Thayer School of Engineering. Gerngross' study, which compared the indirect fossil fuel used to turn corn into plastic and the direct fuel used in conventional chemical methods of producing plastic, discovered that the process of transforming corn into plastic consumes significantly more energy than the traditional method. This conclusion puts a "damper" on continued research into the feasibility of using plant-based plastics instead of chemical-based plastic, said Gerngross, who has spent the last eight years involved in research in polymers or plastics. Yet, he also indicated that while it eliminated one method of using corn as an alternative source of producing plastics, it does not eliminate other methods.