Interdisciplinary approach, global awareness could make UC Davis number one in coffee science

The average UC Davis student has likely had at least one experience of a peer trying to pressure them into taking ECM 1: The Design of Coffee. This course is iconic not only because it fulfills the Science and Engineering general education requirement for non-science students, but also because students get to drink their weight in coffee.

Grace McClintock, a current teaching assistant for the Design of Coffee course and first-year masters student in material science and engineering, explained what a student unfamiliar with the sciences may garner from the course.

“A lot of the people come into the coffee lab without a science background and a lot of science is being able to communicate your ideas,” McClintock said. “[The students] work in groups of three and they have to write their lab reports together, they have to do their final projects together, so they have to learn how to delegate different jobs, how to work together to clean up the space, to divvy up tasks during the coffee lab because multiple things have to happen over the course of the class to finish on time. So those are really important skills for science but they’re also important for life.”

The course is also outstanding to students because of the breadth of science and interest surrounding the study of coffee. Beginning students’ astonishment with the world of coffee may also be the result of a historical truth noted by chemical engineering professor and co-creator of the course William Ristenpart.

“Because coffee is not grown here, there was never any agricultural impetus or push for government supported research,” Ristenpart said. “And without that funding base through the USDA and other entities there was just never any academic research, no academic professors, no curriculum, no classes. We saw this as a big need in the coffee industry and the coffee industry has been extremely supportive.”

The support to which Ristenpart alludes has led to the birth of the UC Davis Coffee Center — the first of its kind and the future home to academic research and education which will speak to the geographical tendency to overlook the study of coffee. Ristenpart draws parallels, or rather perpendiculars, between the study of wine and coffee on this campus and in the world.

“If you look at UC Davis we have a whole department for viticulture and enology,” Ristenpart said. “There’s a whole department of food science and technology with a beer program that’s world famous. If you look around campus there’s basically nobody focused on coffee.”

Although the Coffee Center is still in its development stages, it is receiving a great deal of funding from Peet’s Coffee as a result of the interest of the Specialty Coffee Association. Ristenpart already understands the ways in which research and curriculum will intersect with its ultimate mission — to be the leading site for coffee science in the world.

“What I envision in the long term is a whole curriculum based on coffee,” Ristenpart said. “If you scroll through the online course catalog you’ll see in the wine program there’s a couple dozen courses that undergraduates can take, [and] I can imagine easily many different classes [in coffee science] — all the chemical reactions that take place in roasting, all the physical chemistry of brewing, the stuff I’m doing research on right now.”

Ristenpart’s research is both disjointed from and integral to the study of coffee. He understands chemical engineering to be an ideal lens through which one can consider coffee because the roasting and brewing of the beans change the states of the molecules due to physical reactions.

“My research area of expertise is in transport phenomena and when you think about the act of brewing coffee […] you’re moving molecules from one phase to the other and the final flavor profile depends on which molecules move at which rates,” Ristenpart said. “It’s all tremendously complicated and it’s a lot of fun for people to focus on that.”

While one of Ristenpart’s research projects involves re-evaluating a chart used to optimize dissolved solids in coffee and its flavor, one of the many unique aspects of the Coffee Center is the broad collection of faculty associated and the breadth of research they pursue. Irwin Ronaldo Donis-Gonzalez, an assistant cooperative extensions specialist in post-harvest engineering from the department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, focuses primarily on the drying of coffee beans.

“The Coffee Center will allow us to do multidisciplinary state of the art research, where we are working with chemical engineers, working with mechanical engineers [and] working with post-harvest engineers with physiologists,” Donis-Gonzalez said. “We’re combining all this expertise to try to enhance how coffee is grown, harvested and stored and everything from now on.”

Donis-Gonzalez’s experience as a coffee certifier in Latin America coupled with his focus on coffee drying efficiency in an era of climate change makes him essential to the Coffee Center and insightful about the challenges faced by small coffee growers.

“The problem now with solar drying is that it is, in certain cases, people can’t even do it,” Donis-Gonzalez said. “With all this global warming and global climate change […] it’s just different patterns of weather throughout the whole world. So in places where people would exclusively rely on drying their coffee with the sun right now they’re getting [more rain]. So they are unable to effectively or efficiently dry their product.”

Donis-Gonzalez understands the Coffee Center to be both a project relevant to UC Davis and to the global community. Noting the interdisciplinarity of the center, the international aspect of the coffee trade and the impact of climate change everywhere, he thinks that the Coffee Center has the potential to make an impact on the world.

“This is the world market,” Donis Gonzalez said. “Coffee is an economy for many small families throughout the world so we can only highlight the importance of the Coffee Center because of the impact it might have on the world and it would be very, very positive. If we better one technology here and we can help a small family of five that are working very hard to produce coffee in Guatemala, the world would be a much better place.”

In addition to a heightened awareness of the growers of a product UC Davis students consume everyday, there are many exciting developments in coffee research and coffee study to which the community can look forward. The UC Davis community, outside of research, can also expect potential expansion of coffee courses and coffee study available to students.

“So we’re in the process of setting up a field station there in the northern highlands of Nicaragua,” Ristenpart said. “I’m actually working on a proposal to make kind of a summer abroad or a study abroad type of course where students here could go spend a few weeks down at origin and actually learn about how coffee is processed down there because the vast majority of the work is done at origin and not here.”

The Coffee Center, is also seeking funding for some limited coffee growing greenhouses, already having secured large-scale roasting equipment. The facility will cater to both research and educational opportunities.

“Long term, I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for UC Davis to be a world leader in coffee science,” Ristenpart said. “We already are in wine, we are, depending on who you talk to, at least in the top three for food science, we’re already one of the best for beer. What I’d really like to do is have UC Davis be globally recognized as the place to go to do serious research in coffee science.”

Written by: Stella Sappington — features@theaggie.org

Professors in different departments work to explore games from new angles

By their nature, video games mean different things to different people. To some, they’re simply toys; to others, they’re objects of technical interest, a means of showing advancements in computer graphics or computing power. But the possibilities of video games are much broader. Here at UC Davis, professors in several disciplines are exploring the potential interests of this technological art form.

Colin Milburn is a professor of English and cinema and digital media as well as science and technology studies. His research into the relationship between literature, science and technology has often involved video games.

“I’ve been studying games and gaming culture for about 12 years now,” Milburn said. “Recently, I’ve been looking at the role of games and gaming culture in shaping political attitudes, particularly around the politics of technology and the politics of science […] everything from hacktivist groups like Anonymous or LulzSec who may use video game technologies or software as part of some of their protest operations, to the role that video game imagery and motifs and memes have played in shaping political communities and online discourse.”

Milburn became deeply interested in the possibilities of video games when he realized the extent to which certain games were addressing the issue of nanotechnology, another one of his research interests.

“I had been interested in games for most of my life, but I hadn’t actively pursued them as a research topic until that point,” Milburn said. “Then as I started looking into them I discovered that a tremendous number of commercial games were grappling with some of the social implications of nanotechnology. That was really my first research interest, and then I became convinced that games were a hugely important way of communicating technological and scientific issues [and] of engaging citizens in larger social questions and ethical debates.”

Milburn is also the director of the ModLab, an on-campus research group that focuses on the intersection of technoscience and society, and has studied and developed several video game projects.

“One of our major projects has been a Shakespeare-focused video game called ‘Play the Knave’ which uses motion-capture cameras, Kinect cameras, to map players’ body movements onto avatars and asks people to put on performances of Shakespeare plays,” Milburn said. “It’s a way of getting people to engage with Shakespearean language and the conventions of theatrical performance, while also coming to address their own relationship to the computational interface by their engagement with the form of theater.”

Patrick LeMieux, an assistant professor of cinema and digital media and a member of the ModLab, has been involved in game design for over 20 years, making games like Speculation, an alternate reality game about Wall Street banks.

“Overall, I’m interested in the way in which play reveals the material histories and community practices of different discourses — from conceptual art to finance capital,” LeMieux said.

LeMieux has collaborated with Stephanie Boluk, an assistant professor of English, on both research and teaching. LeMieux and Boluk recently published a book called “Metagaming: Videogames and the Practice of Play,” and they co-teach Cinema and Digital Media 172: Videogames and Culture, which is cross-listed for English, cinema and digital media and science and technology studies.

“Rather than treat video games and culture as two distinct categories that play off one another, in this course we examine how play has evolved alongside video games as a mass medium, cultural commodity and digital technology,” LeMieux said. “And even though it’s a large lecture with about 200 students, we also put these theories into practice by close playing video games like Braid and Portal, learning how to speedrun retro games on Twitch TV, recording audio reviews of audio games designed by and for players who are blind or have low vision and commenting e-sports competitions together.”

Jorge Peña, a communication professor, has a lab which approaches video games from a different perspective than the ModLab. The Virtual Interaction and Communication Technology Research (VICTR) Lab focuses on the more immediate effects of video games on players.  

“The work that we do at the VICTR Lab is looking at how exposure to video games, virtual environments, avatars, et cetera, can change people’s attitudes and behaviors in the real world,” Peña said. “For example, I was interested in whether randomly assigning people to thin or obese avatars would change people’s amount of physical activity as they’re playing a virtual tennis game; for that, I used the Wii Tennis game, in which I was able to modify the appearance of the participants and their virtual opponents.”

As with LeMieux and the ModLab, much of Peña’s work also involves collaboration, with students who work in his lab and with students who help design some of the games he uses for experimentation.

“In the laboratory I have the opportunity to work with students who are interested in building games,” Peña said. “I connect that to my own research interests, and I connect to students that are maybe communications students, that want to learn how to run experiments and how to do their own studies, so they help us in the laboratory to run the experiments […] essentially it’s a collaboration between faculty and students.”

Written by: Gabriel Mulcaire — features@theaggie.org

The tradeoffs of Davis housing spots

When it comes to housing, people find themselves worrying most about rent and who to room with, but it is also worth it to get to know the town, and yourself, well enough so you know what types of things you’d like to live near. Living in a location that best suits your habits can help you better manage your time. If you and your roommates can’t decide between several similarly priced places in entirely different settings, here is a look at some things to expect from living in some of Davis’s neighborhoods.

Downtown:

Living in an apartment or small house downtown is perfect if you want to be close to a variety of restaurants and cafes while also not being too far away from campus. Several bus lines run straight through downtown on Second and Third streets, so it is easy to get to the Silo or MU quickly. Of course, it’s also a very short bike ride.

If you are the type of person who likes to study in a busy public place with lots of hustle and bustle, then living downtown is quite convenient. You can study late at cafes like Mishka’s or Temple without having to worry about a long commute home.

Up G Street in the northwest corner of downtown is the Davis Food Cooperative, which, for downtown residents, is probably the most optimal place to do grocery shopping. It’s also not a far bike or bus ride from the Safeway on the south side of Interstate 80.

West Village:

Despite its relatively small area compared to some of Davis’s other neighborhoods, West Village has sprung up over the last decade as a mini city of its own. West Village has amenities like a gym and pools, and the relative quality of the construction is very nice compared to some of the older apartments across Davis. Getting to campus is quite easy by taking the V line to the Silo, or by biking on one of the sky bridges that go over Route 113. The ARC is the first main landmark you hit when arriving on campus, so it is convenient for students who like to work out at the start or end of their days.

One complaint about West Village is that it can feel quite isolated compared to some other areas of town. Since the majority of the population is students, it can also be easy to feel a bit detached from the outside world. Some students may prefer this and think it more conducive to focusing solely on their studies, while other students derive great energy from being immersed in the Davis community. Since the campus separates West Village from downtown, it can be quite a trek to get to restaurants or other downtown activities.

North Davis:

Anyone who lives in North Davis has at one point in time been asked the question, “Do you shop at Safeway or Savemart?” This is certainly a logical question — the sea of North Davis apartment complexes seems to revolve around the axis of Safeway and Savemart. Both grocery stores are located right along the routes of the J and G Unitrans lines, making it easy to fit a quick trip to the store into your busy schedule. Trader Joe’s is also conveniently located along the G/J Line route. Just be careful — it’s easy to mix up the G and the J since their timing is synchronized, so don’t get on the G to the MU when you have a midterm in SciLec.

If you choose to bike instead, you may prefer taking Oak, which is much less busy than Anderson. The never-ending trek up and down Anderson at least twice a day makes Anderson Road the ultimate Sisyphean nightmare for residents of North Davis.

South Davis:

South Davis is an interesting mix because it is still relatively close to the activity of downtown, but it feels more isolated since you need to cross Interstate 80 to get to class every day. There are bus lines that run along Lillard Drive that help make the commute easy, but some may prefer the peaceful bike ride along the Putah Creek section of the Davis Bike Loop. Davis’s other Safeway is located here along with some restuarants. This is also a good location if you’re looking to get hired or volunteer at the research centers in South Davis.

East Davis:

For people who enjoy spending time downtown, but don’t mind being further away at a lower price, East Davis may be the perfect place. Stopping downtown is easy since it’s on your route everyday for the bus or on your bike, but the further east you go, the more inconvenient it becomes to bike. If biking to and from campus everyday is important to you, you may want to live in a different area of town. That said, one major advantage of east Davis is being close to Target.

Central Davis:

The streets across from the north side of campus, such as Oeste and Parkside, are coveted areas that make up Central Davis. This area mainly includes residential houses as well as the popular Sycamore Lane apartment complex. If you prefer doing errands downtown, in North Davis or at the University Mall, try scoring housing in Central Davis.

This is a good area to live in if you want a more suburban feel with a mixture of students and families. This vibe can also be achieved as you move further east in South Davis, but Central Davis is more ideally located because it’s just about equidistant from most places you would want or need to go, especially campus.

Written by: Benjamin Porter — features@theaggie.org