As a substitute of a protracted parade of beakers and microscopes, this laboratory featured loads of contemporary air and one unimaginable Italian vista.
“It was positively bizarre at first to not be in a standard lab,” Lucero mentioned. “However in so some ways, this felt like one thing extra. We have been in a position to apply the identical concepts of classroom work to this wonderful real-world setting.”
St. Thomas college students work within the Trebotti winery alongside director of the Bernardi Campus Thanos Zyngas.
Lucero and 10 fellow undergrads traveled to Italy for a particular interdisciplinary course, Sustainability of an Italian Winery – A Organic and Chemical Method. Based mostly on the Rome Bernardi Campus, college students commuted every day to a groundbreaking winery exterior town’s partitions.
Finding out on the solely carbon-neutral winery in Italy, the Trebotti wine farm, college students had an up-close look (and style) on the operation’s sustainable practices. No secret was off the desk as house owners allowed college students to assist domesticate new vines, monitor present vegetation with particular bio-mass drones, and even pet the vineyard’s donkey, Jane – who makes a speciality of fertilizing the soil.
However the vineyard additionally doubled as a lab. Every day, college students actually dug in, measuring fungi and micro organism ratios within the soil, monitoring moisture content material, and assessing the composition of the winery’s remaining product, the wine.
“To bridge these information areas, between science, agriculture and sustainability, it was actually cool,” Lucero mentioned. “And what an expertise it was to see a carbon-neutral enterprise that’s really profitable, particularly in agriculture the place they normally have such an enormous carbon output.”
The course was co-taught by chemistry professor Dr. Tom Ippoliti and director of the Bernardi Campus Thanos Zyngas. Collectively, the duo mixed their areas of experience to create the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural expertise for St. Thomas college students.
“I don’t suppose I’ve ever taught a course the place the scholars have been so engaged,” Ippoliti mentioned. “They advised us so many occasions over that they weren’t anticipating many of those interdisciplinary experiences, that they didn’t understand how these actually completely different fields come collectively.”
The winery doubled as real-world science laboratory. College students have been answerable for monitoring and capturing knowledge on every part of the vineyard’s life cycle, taking soil samples and detailing the composition of the ultimate product, the wine.
Over the 2 weeks, college students embraced that interdisciplinary work by way of experiments, demonstrations, cultural web site visits and visitor audio system. And at evening, the group was free to expertise Rome on their very own, getting a definite style of Italian tradition.
“The substantial work of this course was on the vineyard. College students needed to get their arms soiled within the winery – this was handbook work,” Zyngas mentioned. “However this additionally was a course the place we received to do plenty of relationship constructing, of sharing tradition, each within the winery and in Rome.”
For almost 25 years, the Bernardi Campus has welcomed St. Thomas college students to Rome, providing a novel alternative to review within the Everlasting Metropolis. Whereas many programs have capitalized on town’s unimaginable artwork and historical past, this time round, these professors needed to place STEM entrance and middle.
A St. Thomas scholar continues their analysis within the Trebotti wine cellar, working alongside one the winery’s house owners.
“Once you speak about Rome in fact artwork involves thoughts. Artwork is the mainstream of many American applications in Rome,” Zyngas mentioned. “However Tom and I needed to offer this a unique twist and present that science has a spot right here, too.”
That twist on the normal Rome course providing was a lot appreciated by Anna Curtler ’24. A pc and environmental sciences double main, Curtler jumped on the likelihood to take a science-focused course on the Bernardi Campus.
“So many programs overseas deal with artwork or theology, and that’s nice, however I didn’t want these credit,” Curtler mentioned. “To get to have that science studying expertise through the day on the winery, after which once we got here again to campus in Rome, expertise a lot extra of the tradition and artwork, it was a very wonderful setup.”
Curtler acknowledged that such an expertise wouldn’t have been attainable with out the scientific experience of Ippoliti and the cultural connections of director Zyngas.
“Collectively they made it attainable for us to have this wonderful expertise in a spot that was far exterior all of our consolation zones,” Curtler mentioned. “Their management helped us ease the tradition shock and expertise new issues.”
All these new experiences could sometime result in new paths for these Tommies. After seeing quite a lot of know-how used within the winery, from drones to mulching mowers, Curtler plans to think about a profession in agriculture and using sustainable know-how.
“It actually opened my eyes to how a lot know-how is used for sustainable agriculture,” Curtler mentioned. “It positively was inspiring and opened up potentialities about my future.”
