Droughts, floods and tornadoes have forced cities to explore new ways of managing our water resources. Our lab works on nature based solutions to urban floods and droughts by looking at how we can capture and treat stormwater and wastewater for our use. We work with natural media such as compost and biochar to develop cheap but effective methods of water treatment
Emerging pollutants such as PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") and microplastics threaten our drinking water sources as these pollutants, if ingested, can accumulate in our bodies and cause numerous health problems including cancer. Our lab studies how these pollutants move through the environment and develops nature based solutions to remove these toxic pollutants from the environment
Waste and wastewater treatment processes can generate valuable resources. However, the current treatment processes dont yield enough resources to make the system practical. Our lab studies how present treatment processes work and then tweak the design to create free renewable energy and/or resources from the process