Krista Walton dreamt of outer space as a child as she attended space camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.

"Originally, I wanted to be an astronaut," said Walton, assistant professor of chemical engineering. "I thought that was the most exciting job that anybody could ever do."

During junior high and high school, Walton participated in the Science Olympiad and developed a love for chemistry. After a high-school chemistry teacher introduced her to chemical engineering, Walton said she planned a career in chemical engineering - all before she started her senior year of high school.

Walton, 31, started her work on a NASA-related project one month after she received her bachelor's degree in 2000. As a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, she helped develop a separation device that would serve as a larger system to help produce oxygen on Mars.

The project, called Mars In-Situ Resource Utilization, involved using existing resources on Mars to avoid bringing additional materials while traveling there.

"You can imagine flying on a trip to Mars that takes nine months or a year-and-a-half - that's going to cost a lot to try to haul a bunch of fuel and even oxygen to breathe," Walton said.

Because the Mars atmosphere is composed of primarily carbon dioxide, Walton said she and other researchers had a chemical process that converted the carbon dioxide to oxygen using an electrolysis cell.

Walton and other researchers developed an adsorption-based separation system that made the process more efficient, she said. Adsorption is the accumulation of a gas or liquid solute on the surface of a solid, which forms a molecular or atomic film, Walton said.

"So, when you would produce the oxygen, you would have - as a byproduct - carbon monoxide and then there would be some unreacted carbon dioxide as well," she said. "The idea would be to get the carbon dioxide and the carbon monoxide separated from each other; the carbon monoxide could be used for something else and the carbon dioxide would be recycled back into the system."

Walton received her first faculty position in October 2006 at K-State after she served as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Though she had no family members in Kansas, Walton said she knew she would have success with her academic career at K-State.

"I knew there would be various opportunities for developing research collaborations with faculty in the department and around the university," Walton said. "Also, the size of the department is small enough so you can get to know all of the students. It just felt like a really nice place to be."

In comparison with her previous university affiliations, Walton said K-State faculty members make strong connections with undergraduate students.

"I've been so impressed with how the alumni like to come back and visit," Walton said. "They're really supportive of the department, and you do not see that kind of level of involvement at every university."

With her K-State research group, Walton has several federally funded agency projects from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense and the Army Research Office.

As a female engineer, Walton said she didn't notice any comments about her gender until she started looking for faculty positions - she said she often received comments about the effect her career as a woman professor would have if she decided to start a family.

"You're sort of sometimes made to feel like that you're not really supposed to try to do both things," Walton said. "You can be really good at one or really good at the other, but it might be difficult to try to do both."