CEE Seminar: Waste is not Waste until you Waste it

Engineering Lecture Hall (ELH) 110
Maureen Kinyua, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
UC Davis

Abstract: With increasing worldwide populations, it is becoming imperative to design, test and optimize waste-management systems that are geographically, culturally, environmentally and economically appropriate. The use of naturally occurring biochemical processes to our advantage in engineered waste-management systems is necessary to remove pollutants such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and pathogens. This seminar will provide an overview of current fundamental-applied waste-management projects. This includes investigation of energy production and effluent quality in tubular anaerobic digesters treating livestock waste in rural developing communities, evaluation of carbon capture in high-rate activated sludge processes and nitrogen removal from municipal wastewater, and the influence of community structure when treating food waste and emerging contaminants (per and polyfluoroalkyl substances).

Bio: Maureen Kinyua is an assistant professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at UC Davis. Her research interest is biological wastewater treatment with research projects on innovative application of waste to energy, water reuse, and composting systems to promote resource recovery and public health safety in low, middle and high-income regions. Kinyua earned her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in environmental engineering from the University of South Florida and her bachelor's degree in civil engineering from North Dakota State University. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University.