While most people in the United States take clean, readily available water for granted, 22-year-old Shannon Evanchec knows very well many don’t have the same access to water, such as the people she met in rural Indian villages over the summer.

The Knoch High School graduate and Georgia Institute of Technology student spent six weeks in India doing water purification research. She is the daughter of Mark and Jacki Evanchec of Saxonburg.

Evanchec, an environmental engineering major, traveled to five rural villages, knocking on doors of hundreds of houses to collect water samples to test for E. coli contamination. The study she assisted with compared the results of a portable, economical test kit to more traditional water quality tests that use an expensive, lab-based method.

“What our project was doing was developing this presence/absence test kit, which stays yellow if water is clean and turns purple with the presence of E. coli. And the reason we were monitoring E. coli is because it’s a fecal indicator. … And that probably means there’s lots of other things in it to call that water unsafe,” she said.

The lab-based test is called a membrane filtration technique, or MFT, and has more specific results that take days.

The newly developed PA test kits cost about 50 cents each; the MFT method costs around $20 per test.

“It’s a lot cheaper, plus we can give the test kits to households, and they can take water quality into their own hands. So it sort of empowers people to be able to test their own water, too,” Evanchec said.

“So the whole point of this project was to basically get data to prove that our PA test kits work just as well as membrane filtration. And then that can be used on a bigger level,” she said.

The testing was also divided by way the water was used, whether tap water or storage water.

“Nowhere in India has 24/7 continuous water except for two cities,” Evanchec said. “And so they’ll maybe get tap water for 15 minutes a day and then it’ll be cut off, or they’ll have access to a well, and that will be considered their source of tap water. … A lot of the time, it’s stored in big, earthen pots or jars. And then they’ll use that as their water source until the water comes back on and they’re able to use it.”

“But as that water is sitting there, people are sticking their hands in it, flies are getting in it. So the contamination continues as it’s sitting in this stored pot, because normally your tap water is cleaner,” she said.

Evanchec worked with Joe Brown, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, and the project partnered with the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute of India in Nagpur. Results of the various testing will be sent to UNICEF.

“Shannon is very passionate and driven about developing solutions for underserved communities,” Brown said. “She is very bright. She is a leader and I think she’ll go on to do great things no matter what she does.”

Evanchec said the experience went far beyond simply testing water. She got to see the consequences of contaminated water firsthand.

“People’s bones become more brittle at an early age. We saw kids that had the signs of fluoride poisoning along their teeth, which is just a dark line across their teeth at a young age,” she said.

“And then there was a guy who was about 20 years old who couldn’t even take his chin to his chest anymore because his bones were basically solidified because of fluoride poisoning in their water,” she said.

And E. coli contamination in young children can stunt their growth and shorten their lives. Some villages have been adding chlorine to water, which yielded cleaner water as a result.

During the testing, she and another student decided to make a side project of the study, comparing water poured directly from storage and water that is first poured into drinking cups. The results had shown that in more than 90 percent of tests, the drinking cups themselves were contaminating what was clean water.

The two helped collect the information, and they may return to India to conduct further testing on the cups.

“I definitely feel more passionate about the water quality stuff because I got to see how it directly impacts people,” Evanchec said. “It was a very good hands-on experience. And now with this follow-up research project that we’re working on, that’s very appealing to me.”

She said a high-school environment that fostered women pursuing STEM careers definitely helped her in choosing her environmental engineering major, and she credits Knoch High School math teacher Kathy Voltz in particular. STEM is short for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.

Evanchec was the first to receive a local women in STEM scholarship when she graduated from Knoch High School in 2011.

The scholarship is established from a partnership between Female Alliance for STEM Excellence and the Butler Branch of the American Association of University Women, said Colleen Smith, who works at Penn State New Kensington and is a Knoch parent involved with both organizations.

This year, Evanchec spoke at the Young Women in STEM Recognition Night, where the scholarship is distributed.

“The goal of the event was to heighten awareness of the STEM-based opportunity and the roles girls could play,” Smith said.

Showing relatable, local young women who are aspiring to STEM careers makes those careers seem more attainable.

“Shannon specifically has done really great things. And to be able to come back and show some of these girls, they’re maybe not yet able to look beyond,” Smith said. “It’s inspiring for the middle school girls to see the scholarship winners.”