Scott Havens

Granted, it’s not exactly avalanche season but that doesn’t mean that Scott Havens (Engr’07) isn’t busy. With a team of five graduate students at Boise State University, he studies avalanches with the help of sound waves and hopes to create a real-time avalanche monitoring system. To get there, the quintet strives to build and implement infrasound — the sound below the threshold of human hearing in the 1-20 Hz range — microphones to track the avalanches. The relatively cheap devices also are used to measure volcano eruptions and tornadoes.