Joseph Azzarelli, a third-year MIT graduate student in chemistry, works on developing inexpensive, low-power chemical sensors — but the spark that set him on his scientific path has an unlikely source: a presentation on fly-fishing in a bookstore near Kankakee, Ill. The speaker let Azzarelli, 9 years old at the time, practice casting a model fly rod in the store, and he was sold: “I was immediately captivated by the whole process,” Azzarelli says. He began saving money to buy a starter rod and learned to cast, fishing for largemouth bass and sunfish in the creeks and ponds around Kankakee. By the time Azzarelli and his family moved from Illinois to Evergreen, Colo. — a fly-fishing mecca — when he was in the eighth grade, his interest had snowballed into full-blown obsession. He learned to tie flies, studied entomology, and combed through the vast literature on fly-fishing for trout. As a high-school freshman, he got a job at a fly shop in Evergreen called the Blue Quill Angler — “kind of like the MIT of fly-fishing shops,” Azzarelli says. For Azzarelli, the sport shaped his approach to science. “Fly-fishing led me into this awareness of human impact on the environment,
The post Smarter sensing: low-cost sensors to monitor the environment and save money has been published on Technology Org.
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