Chemistry & Biochemistry and Env. Studies Guest Lecture

Prof. William Tarpeh, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, Stanford University, will give a guest lecture via zoom, titled “Tracking and Treating Aqueous Nitrogen Emissions” on Friday, April 2, 2021 at 1:45 PM. Students are invited to meet with Prof. Tarpeh immediately following his lecture.

Abstract: There is an urgent need to reduce the environmental impacts of the anthropogenic nitrogen cycle. Our net discharge of reactive nitrogen (e.g., ammonia, nitrate) threatens aquatic ecosystems and human health by inducing harmful algal blooms that affect 70% of U.S. surface waters and cost over $2.2 billion annually to remediate. Recovering ammonia from wastewater as a fertilizer, fuel, or commodity chemical is a promising method to meet this need, but requires ion-selective separations to extract high-purity ammonia from complex wastewater mixtures. In addition to mitigating nitrogen emissions, electrochemical sensors can enhance spatiotemporal resolution of aqueous nitrogen emissions, which contribute to harmful algal blooms. This seminar will focus on our recent work designing nitrogen-selective processes, materials, and molecular mechanisms to recover and sense ammonia in wastewaters. 

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Sponsored by the Chemistry & Biochemistry department and the Environmental Studies Program