教员亚伦·贝斯特博士(Aaron Best)是该学院领导新项目开发的两名教授之一，他在考虑另一位人物。他关注的是五岁以下儿童是如何受到影响的。

“One child dies every 90 seconds,” said Best, who is the Harrison C. and Mary L. Visscher Professor of Genetics and department chair at Hope and co-leading the creation of the institute with colleague Dr. Brent Krueger. “That’s equivalent to two 747s full of children crashing every day.”

Water quality, Best noted, is also an issue close to home, ranging from the presence of E. coli and agricultural nutrients such as phosphorous in the Macatawa Watershed, to the contamination of drinking water in communities including Benton Harbor and Flint.

“So the problem is acute and needs to be addressed, and we believe that Hope can move into this area and have an impact,” he said.

The Global Water Research Institute (GWRI) is supporting research at Hope concerned with water locally, regionally and globally. “Our vision is to positively impact communities through improved understanding of water and equip them to make data-driven decisions about use of their water,” Best said.

The GWRI is building on experience honed at Hope across decades. Faculty from multiple departments — working collaboratively with Hope students — have been conducting research on water quality and related issues since the latter 1990s, not only locally (examples including the Macatawa Watershed, and microplastics in Lake Michigan), but abroad in nations including the Dominican Republic, Fiji and Kenya.

Students will continue to be centrally involved in the research teams, learning hands-on lessons while helping others. Among the possibilities: nursing students having the chance to monitor children’s health as it changes after switching to clean water; mathematics students learning geographical information system (GIS) data tracking and analytics; engineering students building water catchment and delivery systems; students in biology and chemistry collecting and analyzing the water; psychology and religion students studying the cultural changes after a community gains access to clean water.

The institute is beginning with a share of a $2.5 million gift to Hope this past fall fromSawyer Productsand the Sawyer Foundation. The funding is also supporting the global health program that began in August.

“We’re grateful for Sawyer’s continued partnership,” Best said. “They’re enhancing our ability not only to provide meaningful learning opportunities for our students, including hands-on through research, but to make a lasting difference to the quality of life for people from as nearby as our hometown of Holland to the other side of the world.”

The award also supports the Hope Forward initiative announced in July, through which the college is seeking to fully fund tuition for every student while continuing to offer outstanding programming. The gift is enabling the college to enhance its academic program without drawing on existing resources to do so.

Best and Krueger see the GWRI complementing theglobal health program, which involves 12 departments across campus. Featuring an academic major and minor, the global health program emphasizes applied learning and impact through classroom instruction and collaborative faculty-student research and connections to be established beyond campus to benefit local and global community health. Water quality is among the relevant areas of study, and students in the global health program will be among those working with GWRI faculty researchers.

At the same time, the GWRI isn’t an academic program. The research itself will be the primary purpose of the institute, which will be operating independent of any specific department. The focus places the GWRI among a handful of such initiatives at Hope, including the Frost Center for Data and Research, which is a social science research center established in 1990, the Joint Archives of Holland (1988) and the A.C. Van Raalte Institute (1993).

Hope的研究历史悠久。100多年前，生物学家Samuel O. Mast博士为该学院的Van Raalte Hall设计了研究实验室空间，该实验室于1903年开放。已故的盖瑞特·范·齐尔博士于1923年至1964年在霍普学院教授化学，他从1947年与霍普学院的一名学生一起开展的一个项目开始，在现代意义上发展了研究型学习，这一点得到了广泛认可。多年来，该学院在使用协作研究作为教学工具方面的效率多次得到全国认可，希望学院每年从外部机构获得数百万美元的研究资金。

霍普成功地证明了本科学院的教员可以进行高水平的研究，这让索耶产品公司的创始人兼总裁库尔特·艾弗里(Kurt Avery)支持扩大对水及相关问题的研究。艾弗里之所以这么说，是因为他是霍普大学的校友(1974年毕业于霍普大学)，他认为可以假设是他的个人关系引导了他的决定。Sawyer生产水过滤系统和其他户外产品，他指出，该公司将是那些依赖并受益于正在进行的工作的公司之一。

“我这么做并不是因为我是校友，”他说。“我曾经拒绝过大学里的研究项目，因为它们跟不上进度。”

“霍普管理着一个优秀的科学系，拥有全国顶尖的人才——我还能去哪里?””

基于Hope目前正在进行的水研究，全球水资源资源研究所从三个重点领域开始:获得安全的水;环境健康和可持续性(与水质重叠);并扩大Hope自2020年8月以来一直在进行的废水检测，以检测校园和其他社区是否存在COVID-19。

“You can also monitor other organisms — so, influenza or Epstein-Barr or HIV; any number of types of viruses that could impact public health,” Best said.

According to Best and Krueger, bringing the research together under the umbrella of the institute serves multiple goals, not the least of which is providing a structured way for those involved in the work to connect and brainstorm.

“The GWRI will be a home for faculty with similar research interests so that we can get together, talk about those interests, and look for areas where we might collaborate that we maybe wouldn’t have noticed before that will make each of our projects stronger,” said Krueger, a professor of chemistry and Schaap Research Fellow.

Best and Krueger emphasize that the multi- and inter-disciplinary GWRI is specifically designed to engage faculty from beyond the natural and applied sciences. Academic departments currently represented by faculty members of the institute include biology, chemistry, geological and environmental science, mathematics, political science and religion — breadth that they hope to see grow.

Building on Faculty Experience (GWRI Fellows)

With several members of the Hope faculty already engaged in research related to water and water quality, the new Global Water Research Institute is building on a solid foundation:

• Dr. Aaron Best, the Harrison C. and Mary L. Visscher Professor of Genetics and department chair, co-director
• Dr. Brent Krueger, professor of chemistry and Schaap Research Fellow, co-director
• Dr. Virginia Beard, associate professor of political science
• Dr. Brian Bodenbender, professor of geology and environmental science and department chair
• Dr. Stephen Bouma-Prediger ’79, the Leonard and Marjorie Maas Professor of Reformed Theology
• Dr. Kenneth Brown,professor of chemistry and Schaap Research Fellow
• Professor Suzanne J. DeVries-Zimmerman ’82, assistant professor of geological and environmental science instruction
• Dr. Michael Philben, assistant professor of chemistry and geological and environmental science
• Dr. Michael Pikaart, associate professor of chemistry
• Dr. Brian Yurk ’03, associate professor of mathematics

“It’s important to us that this be campus wide,” Krueger said. “So, for instance, Virginia Beard of the political science faculty worked with us recently on an international project, and when we think of water as a global issue, past, present and future, there’s an opportunity for other faculty in the social sciences and humanities — economics, political science, history…”

Beard collaborated with Best and Krueger on a project focused at the household level in a community in Kenya. Her research background includes training and work in policy and program evaluation; the creation, use and analysis of surveys and survey data; and work in East Africa — in Kenya specifically. “I helped evaluate the data collection tool/surveys, examining research question wording, question order, human subjects protocols in survey research and other such aspects of survey research,” said Beard, an associate professor of political science. “I also helped the team think about cultural aspects of the work given my 22-plus years of experience working in Kenya and with Kenyan partners.”

“The GWRI is exactly the sort of institute that academia needs in order to make real-world impact,” she said. “I have always felt invigorated by research that does not just bring together strong data and bring enlightenment to situations, but also can be used to impact policy and work that affect people’s lives. The GWRI will bring together scholars from multiple disciplines in just the way that was always meant to happen.”

Hope, she noted, is also the right place for a center like the GWRI.

她说:“作为一所以基督教信仰为中心，以在全球社区中终身教育学生为目标的文科院校，希望学院是GWRI的理想所在。”世界杯英格兰队vs丹麦队足彩“水——获得足够和清洁的水——是人们生存能力的核心……过上帝为每个人创造的完整的生活。希望可以通过汇集来自各个部门和学科的同事，在解决全球水问题方面拥有深厚的培训和经验，并拥有强大的基督教世界观基础，来维护世界各地人们的尊严。该研究所将允许教职员工和学生一起工作，学习和创造水资源获取的解决方案。”

Those qualities at Hope are also important to Sawyer, which makes a point of donating its filters, in the tens of thousands, to communities in need.

“We still have a lot of things to prove with the biology of water, but there’s also so much beyond the biology of the water that needs to be tackled,” Avery said.

“You have to look at the totality,” he said. “What changes, for example, when the young women of a community no longer have to spend hours each day walking for miles because that’s where the safe water is? You literally change cultures and communities when you change water, and we haven’t explored all of those impacts yet.”

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