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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for February
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Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Thu, Feb 03, 2022 @ 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Katherine Graham, President's Postdoctoral Fellow, Environmental Engineering, Georgia Tech
Talk Title: Viruses in the urban water cycle: sources of pollution, fate, and public health decision-making
Abstract: Coastal environments across the globe are treasured for their ability to provide sustenance, recreational activities, job opportunities, and diverse habitats for flora and fauna. They are also important human habitats: in the US, 94.7 million people live in a coastal county and worldwide approximately 44 percent of people live within 150 km of a coastline. However, due to population growth, pollution, and overuse of natural resources, many water resources in coastal areas are polluted. Sources of microbial pollution, including wastewater and urban runoff, can transport pathogens to waters where they pose public health risks. However, current indicators for fecal contamination in the environment, like fecal indicator bacteria (FIB), have been shown to poorly correlate with pathogens in the environment, complicating their use in certain settings. Thus a better understanding of the sources and fate of pathogens in the environment and solutions that sustainably reduce the impact of these sources on water resources is needed. At the same time, there are benefits to be gleaned from characterizing anthropogenic pollution sources, as they can be reflective of the infectious diseases circulating in a community. Therefore, tools to harness the information present in sewage should be developed in tandem with strategies to reduce the impact of pollution sources on the environment.
In this seminar, I will first detail how viral pathogens in urban runoff are removed in green stormwater infrastructure to prevent impairments to surface waters and groundwater. Second, I will show how information on pathogens in wastewater can be used to inform public health decision-making, particularly during the COVID 19 pandemic. I will then discuss future teaching and research directions at the intersection of water, climate, and health issues, with the ultimate goal of providing safe and accessible water for all.
Biography: Katherine (Katy) Graham is a President Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech in Environmental Engineering. Katy received her BSE in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2015 and completed her MS and PhD at Stanford University in 2021. She is broadly interested in the characterization of pathogens and microbial communities in the natural and built environments to inform public health risk assessment and decision-making. She collaborates with multidisciplinary scientists and engineers to understand how to sustainably mitigate sources of microbial pollution to the environment, the utilization of human waste to understand public health trends, and the use of genomic information on pathogens in the environment to inform advanced public health risk assessment models.
Host: Dr. Amy Childress
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91873923659? Meeting ID: 918 7392 3659 Passcode: 975701Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91873923659? Meeting ID: 918 7392 3659 Passcode: 975701
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Thu, Feb 10, 2022 @ 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ryan Kingsbury, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Researcher, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Talk Title: Accelerated discovery of precise ion separation materials
Abstract: Climate change, water scarcity, and food security are among the greatest public health and environmental challenges of our time. Emerging electrochemical technologies have the potential to help address all three by offering clean, efficient means of producing clean energy, purifying nontraditional water supplies, or recovering valuable resources from waste. All such technologies incorporate engineered materials that promote the selective movement of charged species (ions) in aqueous solutions, and their technical and economic feasibility is often constrained by how well those materials perform. Thus, advancing the state of the art of ion separation materials, such as polymer ion exchange membranes, is crucial to the development of sustainable technologies across the water-energy nexus. However, we lack the molecular-level understanding of ion separations that we need to rationally design new materials with higher performance. This seminar will describe our current understanding of ion transport phenomena in polymer membranes, identify crucial knowledge gaps, and highlight opportunities to advance the state of the art by combining experiments and atomistic simulations. Insights from this research will accelerate development of materials with more precise ion selectivity, leading to powerful new technologies for addressing sustainability challenges.
Biography: Dr. Ryan Kingsbury has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2019. Prior to LBNL, he obtained a PhD in Environmental Sciences and Engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was named a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and recognized with a Student Fellowship Award by the North American Membrane Society. Before graduate school he worked as a consulting engineer in the drinking water treatment field, earning a Professional Engineering license in 2013, and founded a startup company to develop a novel energy storage process. Ryan studies electrochemical technologies for clean water and clean energy production, with a particular focus on developing ion-selective materials.
Host: Dr. Amy Childress
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91873923659 Mtg ID: 918 7392 3659 Pass: 975701Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91873923659 Mtg ID: 918 7392 3659 Pass: 975701
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Thu, Feb 17, 2022 @ 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Kandis Leslie Abdul-Aziz , Chemical and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Riverside
Talk Title: Creating Value from Waste and Pollution: Sustainable chemical processes to promote a circular economy
Abstract: A circular economy aims to redefine growth, focusing on society-wide benefits beyond the current take-make-waste industrial model. It entails an economic outlook that goes beyond the consumption of finite resources and develops strategies for utilizing waste. This presentation presents two strategies for the utilization of waste. The project will discuss the advent of a circular agriculture economy and how one of the top waste agriculture crops in the U.S., corn stover, can be engineered into valuable products. The first part of the presentation will discuss our efforts to convert corn stover into a source for sugar fatty acid ester pesticides to control the population of Asian citrus psyllid. Asian citrus psyllid poses a risk to citrus crops, and there are limited organic pesticide choices for growers and farmers. Sugar fatty acid ester pesticides are renewable and environmentally benign alternatives. The second part of the presentation will demonstrate the influence of hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) or slow pyrolysis (SP) process conditions on the physicochemical properties of precursor biochars and activated carbon (AC). The AC is achieved through a direct or two-step method with subsequent chemical activation using KOH. A theory is developed on the biochar propensity to be chemically activated based on the composition of the lignocellulosic structure. The activated carbon was utilized for wastewater treatment applications. The presentation will conclude with a discussion on a circular economy and the role of engineers.
Biography: Dr. Kandis Leslie Abdul-Aziz is an Assistant Professor in the Chemical and Environmental Engineering department at the University of California, Riverside. She joined the University in 2018 after receiving her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining UC Riverside, she was a Provost postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she developed procedures for synthesizing heterogeneous catalysts using atomic layer deposition. She has also worked previously as a Forensic scientist for the Philadelphia police department and as a Refinery chemist at Sunoco Chemicals in Philadelphia after receiving a B.S. in Chemistry from Temple University. Her research group develops sustainable catalytic processes using an interdisciplinary toolset from materials and chemical engineering and physical chemistry for sustainable applications. She was awarded a 2022 National Science Foundation Career Award and is a Scialog Negative Emissions Fellow.
Host: Dr. Amy Childress
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91873923659 Meeting ID: 918 7392 3659 Passcode: 975701Location: Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience (MCB) - 101
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91873923659 Meeting ID: 918 7392 3659 Passcode: 975701
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes