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Blue Devil of the Week: Devoted to Greater Water Accessibility

Professor Ana Barros researches the water-cycle process

Ana Barros shows off a letter her then 10-year-old daughter wrote to her in 2004, shortly after she started at Duke.
Ana Barros recently found a letter addressed to her from her daughter, Joana, written on Oct. 2, 2004. Joanna had accompanied Barros to work one afternoon and decided to write her mother a note asking if they could go to dinner.

Name: Ana Barros

Position:  James L. Meriam Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Years at Duke: 13 years

What she does at Duke: Barros teaches classes such as Fluid Mechanics and Physical Hydrology and oversees independent studies in the Pratt School of Engineering. Her research is devoted to hydrology and environmental physics, primarily the water-cycle process.

Barros’ work focuses on the predictability of rainfall in mountainous regions like the Appalachians and Andes. By studying the amount of precipitation and where it travels, Barros hopes her research results in greater water availability for people to drink, store and use in manufacturing. Studying precipitation also leads to better understanding when natural hazards may occur. 

“Water is used for absolutely everything,” Barros said. “To produce a kilo of fabric you use 15,000 to 20,000 liters of water. There’s nothing you can’t do without water.”

What she loves about Duke: Barros said Duke is an ideal place for interdisciplinary work. The graduate students Barros oversees often take courses in four to five departments across the university because her work touches subjects like geology, statistics, math, physics, ecology and hydrology.

Barros, center, installing rainfall measurements in Peru.“For example, a large component of our work brings together atmospheric physics and electrical engineering,” Barros said. “We tend to go where the problems and the science takes us without needing to worry where we belong. Nobody seems to think that’s strange at Duke, which is liberating, because it’s definitely not the same elsewhere.”

Most memorable day at work: On May 10, 2009, Barros was dealing with a cold. It was the day of commencement, and Barros talked herself out of going, despite the speaker being Oprah Winfrey. That’s when her daughter, Joana, stepped in to tell Barros she better attend the event.

“Oprah was standing in the corner when all of the faculty were getting our robes on,” Barros said. “I saw her and felt like I better go say hi. I shook her hand. I went back home and said, ‘yes, I did that.’”

First-ever job: Barros, who grew up in Portugal, spent a summer when she was 16 years old working with archeologists near the town of Monção. The archeologist recruited students from her school to excavate ruins of Castro de Sao Caetano, a fort that dates back to the first century.

“Some days I dug, other days I cleaned artifacts,” she said. “I learned how to do work very slowly and purposely.”

Best advice received: Barros often reminds herself and students to never take rejection personally.

You get a lot of rejection in science,” she said. “There’s a lot of skepticism. You have a new idea and it takes three to five years or longer to prove something. It’s tough. You have to develop a thick skin.”

Special memorabilia in her office: In a desk drawer, Barros recently found a letter addressed to her from her daughter, Joana, written on Oct. 2, 2004, when she was 10 years old.

The letter read:

Dear mother, I am truly very hungry. I know I brought carrot sticks to fill my hunger but they are not at all filling to the biting sensation I feel in my stomach. If you would be so kind to give me dinner I would be ever so please. I feel that when I am eating carrot sticks I am merely eating air.”

The letter was written recently after Barros started at Duke and gave her and Joana, who is now 23, a good laugh.

Fun fact: Barros was born in the Angolan rainforest. The Portuguese government sent her father to what is now Angola when it was under the European rule. Barros’ father was an administrator in the Lunda district, in the northeast of the country.

“Portugal had all these colonies over the place and they weren’t very populated by the Portuguese,” Barros said. “My father, being young and a nobody in the government, was sent as a representative.”

Barros, her mother and father lived in Angola until its independence in 1971.

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