News

Bezbaruah and West Fargo students win NASA award. Achintya Bezbaruah, assistant professor of environmental engineering, and a group of junior high students from West Fargo, took first place out of more than 300 teams in the nationwide Waste Limitation Management and Recycling (WLMR) Design Challenge organized by NASA. The competition aimed to find a design that converts human urine and wastewater into drinkable water to reduce future lunar settlers’ dependence on the Earth.  

Kathy Enger, Assistant Professor in the School of Education, Achintya Bezbaruah from Civil Engineering, and Manjusha Saraswathiamma, a doctoral student in the School of Education and also an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Minnesota State Community and Technical College in Moorhead, are the recipients of an Advance FORWARD Climate and Gender Equity Research Grant. Their project is titled “Motivation and Adaptability Factors for Females in the ‘Leaky Engineering Pipeline’ is funded for one year.  

Environmental and Conservation Sciences (ECS) associate faculty members Donna Jacob (Research Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences), Achintya Bezbaruah (Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering), and Marinus Otte (Professor of Biological Sciences) secured funding from the ECS Program to pursue research concerning nanoparticle uptake by wetland plants.  

The North Dakota Water Resources Research Institute (NDWRRI) has announced its annual graduate research fellowship recipients for 2009-10. Fellowships ranging from $4,000 to $12,000 were awarded to graduate students from NDSU. Three Nanoenvirology Research Group (NRG) members won the fellowship this year. NRGian Harjyoti Kalita’s (doctoral student in Materials and Nanotechnology) project on “Iron Imprinted Polymer for Removal and Monitoring of Arsenic" was selected for funding. NRG member Rabiya Shabnam (master’s student in Environmental and Conservation Sciences) won the fellowship for her project titled “Interactions between Microorganisms and Metal Nanoparticles: A New Approach for Groundwater Remediation”. Another NRG member Sita Krajangpan (doctoral student in Civil Engineering) was awarded the fellowship for her work on “Modification of Iron Nanoparticles by Amphiphilic Polysiloxane Graft Co-Polymer for Arsenic, TCE, and RDX Remediation”.