(2jt) Advanced Membrane Separations as a Teaching-Focused Faculty Member

Searching for teaching-focused future opportunities: tenure-track faculty member at primarily undergraduate university, lecturing professor at an R1 or R2 university, or postdoctoral research associate in engineering education.

Research Interests:

Radiopharmaceuticals offer promising new approaches for both imaging and treating cancerous tumors in personalized medicine. An emerging isotope for use in radiopharmaceuticals is copper-67 (67Cu) which can provide treatment (via beta decay) and imaging (via gamma rays). Currently, 67Cu is purified using resin-packed columns, which exhibit (1) low column flow rates, (2) high elution volumes and (3) long purification times—all of which contribute to the bottleneck in the sustained supply of 67Cu. Due to the short half-life (2.58 days) of 67Cu, rapid purification from competing isotopes (57Ni, 62Zn, 65Zn, and unreacted 68Zn) is key for increasing the availability of the isotope for clinic trials and use. Membrane adsorbers are well-positioned to meet that need and are the focus of my doctoral research.

Over the past 5 years as a PhD student, I have gained significant experience in teaching, mentoring. I have mentored 4 undergraduate researchers, who have presented and won awards for their research at national conferences (AIChE, North American Membrane Society). My extensive classroom experience includes four chemical engineering TA positions: chemical engineering laboratory, introduction to chemical systems, and transport phenomenon. Beyond the standard TA responsibilities, I volunteered as a guest lecturer and was invited to lecture in the years following. I sought professional development opportunities to become a more effective teacher both in lectures and laboratory settings through CWRU’s Future Faculty Certificate program and a teaching mentorship in my department.

Teaching Interests:

My future research program is motivated by leveraging selective membrane separations to advance applications such as sustainability, pollution prevention, resource recovery and wastewater monitoring. One example is landfill mining which is an approach that marries element recovery, sustainability, and pollution prevention. Being able to separate rare earth elements (REEs) would decrease the US’s dependence on China’s REE production and decreasing landfill volume. Currently, this field of study is widely overlooked due to lack of efficient separation techniques. I propose to use membrane adsorbers, to extract REEs effectively and efficiently from landfill sites. A second example is wastewater surveillance. In the 1940’s wastewater surveillance was used to monitor polio and other viral pathogens¹. This method is still used to identify potential outbreaks such as, hepatitis A, SARS-CoV-2, and other viruses that shed in stool. However, Sims et al., notes that a disadvantage of wastewater analysis lies in the “[s]ignificant time-lag between data collection and analysis”². I propose using membrane separation techniques to decrease the time lag for analysis thus enabling on-site monitoring. Key scientific challenges will include discovering rapid, selective ligand chemistries for specific targeting.

In the classroom, I am excited to teach the chemical engineering core courses and develop new electives in the areas of membrane separations, statistics for engineers, or radiochemistry. I am committed to equitable and digitally accessibility in classrooms to provide access for all students.

(1) Schmidt, C. Watcher in the Wastewater. Nat. Biotechnol. 2020, 38 (8), 917–920.
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41587-020-0620-2.

(2) Sims, N.; Kasprzyk-Hordern, B. Future Perspectives of Wastewater-Based Epidemiology: Monitoring Infectious Disease Spread and Resistance to the Community Level. Environ. Int. 2020, 139, 105689.
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ENVINT.2020.105689.