(2ju) Developing frugal and sustainable techniques for addressing the health issues arising from legacy and emerging nano-contaminants

Over the last ten years, working in different capacities, I have gained a diverse research experience in both academia and industry. Before joining my Ph.D., I had the privilege to work on a wide spectrum of projects that spanned from theoretical research (master’s thesis) to performing process scale-up validating chemical processes at the plant scale at a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. The composite skillset that I honed over my career has enabled me to balance the theoretical and practical aspects of my Ph.D. thesis project on developing ‘Sustainable and energy-efficient plant protein functionalized filters for virus and nanoparticle removal’. I have also been able to contribute a substantial body of work to the development of biophysical techniques to study membrane proteins and develop biomimetic membranes. During my Ph.D., I developed the relevant expertise and an acute awareness of the challenge of drinking water contamination and the critical gap in research for building sustainable, nature-based, and bioinspired solutions to overcome this challenge. In my academic career, I would like to continue applying my unique background to develop frugal and sustainable techniques for addressing the health issues arising from legacy and emerging nano-contaminants. I would also like to continue working on biomimetic and bioinspired membranes for applications in key areas including nutrient and rare earth element recovery from waste streams.

In my Ph.D., I have developed a novel plant-protein functionalized filtration technology to achieve unprecedented water-borne pathogens removals. To fabricate these filters, I developed an uncomplicated functionalization process where a water extract of Moringa oleifera seeds can be used to efficiently adsorb cationic proteins onto the surface of negatively charged substrates. With lab-scale and preliminary field-scale studies, we showed that the developed filtration technology can achieve highly efficient virus and nanoparticle removal from water. The research yielded two publications in prestigious journals ES&T and npj clean water and the recent work also received second prize in AIChE environmental division graduate paper award. I aim to cultivate a productive research group that fosters collaboration and interdisciplinary research working towards the following projects based on my experience with functionalized filtration technologies. 1) Building a platform of functionalized depth filters for energy-efficient nanoparticle removal from drinking water 2) Develop a bioinformatic workflow to identify plant antimicrobial protein with potential for virus inactivation and removal 3) Establish a quick screening procedure for studying the feasibility of filtration techniques for the removal of emerging contaminants.

In addition to my thesis work, I have gained significant expertise in the field of bioinspired and biomimetic membranes (BBMs). My experience has been developing and testing methods for ion and water transport in biomimetic membranes and developing theoretical bridges between the two parallel fields of biological and synthetic membrane transport. I was able to contribute to some high-impact publications in the field and going forward I wish to align the experience I have gained through these interactions with my research goals. Sustainably meeting the food requirements while mitigating the harm due to increasing fertilizer usage is an important challenge of the 21^st century. Ammonia production alone accounts for 2% of the world's energy use field. In addition, it is estimated that 30% nitrogen and 16% phosphorus from fertilizers end up in wastewater streams and treating this contamination using sludge aeration accounts for 4% of annual electricity consumption in the United States. Recovery of nutrients such as urea, phosphorus, and ammonia from wastewater is an essential strategy to address the sustainability issues with fertilizer production and wastewater treatment.

Although traditional membranes show potential for application in nutrient recovery, challenges with fouling and low selectivity restrict their application. Alternately, forward osmosis, membrane distillation, and electrodialysis are being explored to overcome these challenges. However, the low selectivity at high permeability (permeability-selectivity trade-off) plagues all the traditional membrane processes. BBMs are aimed at overcoming this fundamental challenge using the high selectivity of biological channel proteins. In my future work, I aim to develop novel BBMs using ion-selective channels (urea and ammonia transporters) for wastewater nutrient recovery. During my Ph.D., I developed expertise in high-level techniques for the measurement of single-channel water and ion permeability through biological channels. I propose to use these techniques to measure the urea and ammonia transport of bacterial channels to establish the feasibility of membranes.

Teaching interests

The prospect of teaching the future generation of engineers is a strong and intensely personal motivation for me to pursue an academic career. I owe my success largely to the influence my father (a high school teacher) and other cherished mentors had on my life, and I aim to pay it forward. Due to this reason, I made sure both teaching and mentorship are important parts of my academic experience during both my master's and Ph.D. education. Overall, I worked as a teaching assistant six times in both lab and classroom settings and mentored 9 undergraduate and 2 early Ph.D. students. These experiences helped me develop my own approach to teaching with the following core principles 1) Promote an open and inclusive learning environment to encourage student feedback 2) Make fundamental concepts approachable through practically relevant examples 3) Incorporate accessible and effective scientific communication as a course objective.

From my experience as a teaching assistant, I believe that successful teachers foster an inclusive and open environment by constantly accounting for student feedback. I practiced this philosophy in all the teaching sessions and office hours during my Ph.D. and received excellent feedback from students. My student evaluation rating was 4.82/5.0 for the unit operations lab course that I TAed. In addition, while teaching the specific course of fluid mechanics at Pennsylvania State University, I actively helped with preparing course materials, and exams, and received feedback from both students and the professor. This was one of the highest-rated courses for Prof. Kumar during his time at Penn State and his evaluations included several supportive comments about my work as a TA. I created a question bank for homework and exams with over 100 examples that are still being used by Profs. Gomez and Velegol at Penn State. I will adopt the practices I developed during my time as a TA to ensure I provide an open classroom atmosphere. I aim to hand out the list of expected learning objectives to the students at the beginning of the week and implement an anonymous survey at the end of the week to adjust throughout the semester.

During my experience mentoring undergraduate students as a research mentor and a lab instructor, I learned that it is easy for students to grasp the fundamentals when visual and practically relevant examples are provided. I took this experience and implemented it to create practically relevant examples for homework assignments. For example, instead of a problem that asks to just calculate the stress created by the fluid flow between two surfaces I provided an example where students had to choose the best lubricant to use in their bicycle based on the stress generated. It was very rewarding to receive positive feedback from students for the same. Going forward, I will strive to build course material with practically relevant examples from my industrial or research experiences.

Finally, I believe accessible and effective science communication is essential for any engineer. As a non-native speaker, I had to work hard to build this skill over time, so I want to incorporate this as a course objective in all my classes. Due to the type of research, I pursued during my Ph.D., I had to learn how to communicate different concepts to people from a range of backgrounds. I worked with a non-profit organization, ECHO global farm to set up a field-scale prototype of filters where I had to explain the underlying science to agriculture majors, biologists, and aid workers with no science and technology background. In summer 2022, I mentored two teachers from local high schools as part of the research experience for the teachers' program at UT Austin. It was a rewarding experience that taught me how to communicate scientific research effectively so that it is accessible to middle and high school students. These experiences nudged me to participate in a 3-minute pitch competition where we need to explain our Ph.D. project concisely for which I won the third prize. I will incorporate a 3-minute pitch seminar once or twice during a semester in all my courses where students can choose a topic and present it with a practical example.

My training in chemical engineering has equipped me with a solid foundation of fundamentals of mass balance, thermodynamics, and transport phenomena. In addition, working in separations engineering with a focus on water treatment to address real-world environmental challenges has prepared me to effectively teach both environmental and chemical engineering courses. I am excited to implement my unique perspective in areas including water and wastewater treatment design, membrane science and processes, and environmental sustainability. I am also qualified to instruct chemical engineering-related courses including transport phenomena, and colloid and interfacial phenomena that could be graduate electives.