Ole Miss’ Sustainable Energy and Environment research group received a $1.6 million research grant from the National Science Foundation.
Students and faculty will use the grant to research creative and cheap ways to reduce climate change, improve energy efficiency and reduce water and air pollution, according to the university.
Riya Chatterjee, a chemical engineering graduate student, arrived in Oxford two months ago from India. She has a master’s degree in water pollution research and is completing her doctoral degree.
“I was looking for my subject area,” Chatterjee said. “I searched through universities and found that this is the kind of research that is for me.”
Dr. Wei-Yin Chen, Professor of Chemical Engineering is one of the co-principal investigators on the sustainable energy and environment project. (Photo by: Xinyi Song)
The co-principal investigators on the project are Ole Miss Chemical Engineering professors Wei-Yin Chen and Nosa Egiebor.
“The four universities are principle investigators,” Egiebor said. “Each one of us has our own expertise, and the combination is a very unique program.”
The grant will fund a larger operation to promote research that will help civil-related issues on the Earth’s surface with sources such as energy, food and water. Four universities received a piece of the $6 million grant pie. Other than Ole Miss, The University of Delaware, The University of Wyoming and Jackson State University will also benefit.
“The National Science Foundation believed that the universities have the capability to fabricate a program that will benefit to all (scientific) subjects,” Egiebor said.
Egiebor said Ole Miss will use the grant to train a number of students, both graduate and undergraduate, in their engineering specializations.
“We have a number of them working for us, some in chemical engineering and some in chemistry,” Egiebor said.
While the project itself is in chemical engineering, there are collaborators in chemistry and in physics as well.
The research team members include engineering science doctoral student Adedapo Adeniyi, professors Daniel Mattern, Nathan Hammer and Davita Watkins of the chemistry and biochemistry department, Charles Church of the National Center for Physical Acoustics and Joel Mobley of the physics and astronomy department, according to the university.
“All of these are going to contribute their own expertise in one way or another. It is a project that provides support to explore the production of materials that can be used for environmental remediation, both water and waste reduction,” Egiebor said.
The grant will fund Ole Miss’ research to produce a material that can be used to treat water from biomass that would be otherwise wasted. They will be taking organic material and make biochar, which can be activated and used to clean contaminated or polluted water.
Chen will be on the energy side of the grant. He is looking at different ways of treating the biochar to give it more energy content. The goal is for it to be used as a renewable source, since it is coming from biological materials.
“People in chemistry are studying how these materials react with each other and how they behave when you add a variety of treatments to them,” Chen said.
Egiebor’s research specialty is water and waste reduction. From his end, the focus is using the same resources and to be able to use it to treat water.
Egiebor said he believes the grant will bring positive attention to Ole Miss and Mississippi, as well.
“It is potentially an excellent project for the state of Mississippi because it provides support to explore the development of neo-energy technology,” Egiebor said.
