OUT OF THIS WORLD: KIMBERLY JONES HOPES HER RESEARCH MAY SOME DAY HELP TO MAKE LIVING ON MARS POSSIBLE.

If Kimberly Jones has her way, future space travelers will be drinking their own shower water. Well, after it's run through a few filters, of course. Jones, a professor of civil engineering at Howard University in Washington, is working with researchers from Purdue University and Alabama A&M University at the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training for Advanced Life Support. The center's mission is to create space colonies whose inhabitants will live on crops they grow themselves and recycle all their waste. Her work on purifying wastewater by running it through filtering "membranes" is vital to creating that environment.

In addition to her research, Jones for the past seven years has taught the Introduction to Engineering course. Run by five professors, one from each of the engineering disciplines taught at Howard, the course is mandatory for all freshman engineering majors.

Jones didn't always know she wanted to be an engineer. "I sketched a lot as a child and thought I would be an architect," she says. "But I liked math and science, too." Jones needed a guidance counselor to "suggest civil engineering as a way to combine the two."