University of Iowa student making strides in soil research

For University of Iowa student Cheryl Reuben, being a woman in engineering runs in the family.

“I wasn't really the biggest fan of science when I was in elementary and middle school. I wasn't great at it and I found it kind of frustrating. But in high school, I took my first chemistry class and I really enjoyed it and it made sense,” Reuben said.

“I knew I wanted to do something related to science, and chemistry specifically. The main thing that pushed me toward engineering is I really enjoyed math in high school, and my mom is also an engineer. She works at Collins Aerospace. Sometimes I would hear her talk about what she did and I always thought it was pretty cool.”

Reuben, 21, of Cedar Rapids, is now a junior in the UI chemical engineering program, and she’s already had opportunities to create impactful research.

Last fall, she was recognized as one of the university’s Dare to Discover honorees, for engineering predictive models that could be used to determined soil quality based on data such as air humidity, soil moisture and soil temperature.

The project started with a conversation with her academic adviser, Jun Wang, during her freshman year, in which he mentioned the soil analysis work that he had been doing with students in his lab. Reuben thought the research sounded interesting and Wang invited her to work in his lab over the summer.

She ended up working in the lab for all of her sophomore year. She still works in the lab occasionally, but she’s busier with classes now, and also working as a teaching assistant in the engineering program.

When Reuben joined Wang’s lab, the researchers already had developed two kinds of sensors, one for the air they used to detect things like air temperature, air pressure and humidity, and one for the soil they used to detect things like soil moisture and soil temperature at different depths.

Reuben’s work was aimed at connecting the dots between the data collected by the two different sensors. She worked with a coding language she hadn’t learned before and created models that could use the data from one sensor to predict what the data on the other sensor might be in coming days. That way, the models could potentially be used by farmers to forecast soil quality based on things they could measure in the air — similar to how weather forecasters predict the weather.

“It was all completely new. Most of the work was coding and machine learning, and I had had no experience at all coding in Python,” a programming language, Reuben said.

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“Over the summer, I worked with a mechanical engineering professor who teaches a class on machine learning and Python, and he also worked closely with Dr. Wang. I basically took a crash course in Python and machine learning, then while I was still working with that professor, I used the data not only to learn how to use Python, but then to actually apply what I was learning and actually analyze it.”

Wang nominated Reuben for the Dare to Discover award, not only because he was impressed with the work she did, but also because he was impressed with her persistence in learning new skills.

“She’s not afraid to try things and if the first time it doesn’t work, she will try a second time and a third time,” Wang said. “There are very few students who boast academic excellence, in their coursework and GPA, but also excellence in research in trying to go beyond just the coursework, to challenge themselves to do something.”

Reuben is set to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in chemical and biochemical engineering in May 2025. While she plans to initially get a job working in industry safety, she hopes to one day return to education to support other people entering the field.

“I think I want to go back to school and get either a master’s or a Ph.D. and ultimately teach. I work as a teaching assistant here at the university, and I’ve really enjoyed it and I find it very fun. Working with the professors, I've gotten to see how much thought they put into what they're teaching and how they teach and how they want the students here to grow,” Reuben said. “I think contributing back as a professor would be something that I'm very interested in.”

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