ENS Laboratory Facilities

Hands-on, interactive learning:

All our majors engage in independent undergraduate research projects as part of the Environmental Studies program. The topics of these projects vary greatly, depending on the interests of the students. We firmly believe that students learn by "doing" and incorporate hands-on, interactive learning in virtually all of our courses.

Sample Preparation Lab Samples collected in the field need to be prepared before they can be analysed. This lab is where that is done.
X-Ray Diffraction Prep Lab The College of Ceramics at Alfred University generously permits our students to have access to their state-of-the-art X-Ray Diffraction Analysis facility.To prepare clay samples for that analysis, students use the ball mill and other equipment in this lab.		$X-Ray Diffraction sample preparation lab$
Ion Chromatograph Used on water samples, ion chromatography provides a quantitative analysis of many anions and cations. (Web resource.)
Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer This instrument is used for quantitative analysis of a variety of metals dissolved in water samples. (Web Resource)
Research Microscopes We have several very high quality light microscopes, including this one, which has the capability of doing mineralogical analysis of rock samples. (Web Resource)
Digital Imaging System To go along with our microscopes we have a high resolution digital imaging system and a dedicated computer plus software to allow research microscopy of small inorganic particles and microscopic organisms
Tree Ring Analysis Lab A separate digital imaging system utilizes scanned images to analyze the growth rings of trees for ecological and climatological analyses. We also have tree ring corers and facilities for preparation of cored tree sections for image analysis.