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UnDisciplined: The Archaeologist And The Chemical Engineer

Utah Public Radio | By Matthew LaPlante

Published May 17, 2019 at 1:27 PM MDT

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A team of Washington State University archaeologists recently announced the discovery of the oldest known tattooing artifact in southwestern North America.

Bob Hubner / WSU

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Andrew Gillreath-Brown is a doctoral candidate at Washington State University.

WSU

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A team of researchers at the University of Utah have developed a jet mixer that can quickly turn microalgae into biocrude.

ClimateTechWiki

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Swomitra Mohanty is an assistant professor of chemical and metallurgical engineering at the University of Utah.

University of Utah

This week on UnDisciplined, we're talking about biofuels ... and tattoos.

We're introducing an archaeologist and a chemical engineer, and if that doesn't already sound like a strange pairing, just consider what these guys study.

Andrew Gillreath-Brown is a doctoral candidate at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Writing in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, he and his colleagues recently announced the identification of a 2,000-year-old tattooing needle — one of the oldest such instruments ever discovered.

Swomitra "Bobby" Mohanty is an assistant professor of both chemical and metallurgical engineering at the Univeristy of Utah. He and his team recently described their super-fast method of turning algae into biocrude in the journal Chemical Engineering Science.