News & EventsDepartment Events
Events
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Jan22
EVENT DETAILS
lessStable Isotope Tracing in Microbical Secretions to Capture Soil Carbon Cycling Dynamics
Carbon turnover in soils is a critical component of the global carbon cycle. Microbial metabolism, which is influenced by oxygen availability, drives carbon transformation in soils. Traditionally, stable isotope tracers in DNA have been used to identify active microbial players. Metabolic potentials for carbon turnover are then inferred based on gene-based predictions. However, to interpret or validate these predictions, direct annotation of metabolic activities remains a major challenge. Metabolomics, an emerging omics technique that profiles the chemical fingerprint of metabolic reactions, provides an instrumental approach to address this challenge. In this talk, I will present the first investigation of my postdoctoral work that explores the application of metabolomics analyses of soil water extracts. Specifically, 13C tracers in metabolites in soil solutions were used to capture microbial metabolic activities in soils subjected to different redox conditions. My findings show that such metabolomics measurements can provide insights to support or resolve DNA-based predictions of relevant metabolism involved in soil carbon cycling. In ongoing projects, I continue to implement metabolomics approaches to understand carbon transport in a watershed in relation to ecosystem metabolism.
Bahareh Hassanpour is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Aristilde Research Group in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Northwestern University. Her research interests are in nutrient cycling,fate, and transport. Prior to joining Northwestern, Bahar earned her Ph.D. degree at Cornell University, studying hydrological controls on non-point source pollution (nitrate and pesticides) removal by the edge-of-field techniques that utilize organic substrates. Interested in the molecular understanding of carbon cycling, she is working on applying metabolomics approaches to investigate carbon cycling in soil and riverine systems.
TIME Friday, January 22, 2021 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Jan26
EVENT DETAILS
lessA Calculation of the Social Returns to Innovation
What are the social returns to investments in innovation? The disparate spillovers associated with innovation, including imitation, business stealing, and intertemporal spillovers, have made calculations of the social returns difficult. Northwestern Kellogg School of Management’s Benjamin F. Jones will provide an economy-wide calculation that nets out the many spillover margins. He will assess the role of capital investment, diffusion delays, learning-by-doing, productivity mismeasurement, health outcomes, and international spillovers in assessing the average social returns. Overall, estimates suggest that the social returns are very large. Even under conservative assumptions, innovation efforts produce social benefits that are many multiples of the investment costs.
TIME Tuesday, January 26, 2021 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
CONTACT Northwestern Engineering Events northwestern-engineering-events@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
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Jan29
EVENT DETAILS
lessMembrane distillation for hypersaline brine management: Material innovation, resilience, and energy consumption
Membrane distillation (MD), a hybrid thermal-membrane desalination technology, has recently received tremendous interest as a sustainable technology for the treatment of hypersaline brines. MD is tolerant to higher salinity (than reverse osmosis) and capable of leveraging low-grade thermal energy such as waste heat and geothermal energy. However, several fundamental aspects need to be addressed for industrial adoption of MD. In this seminar, I will present and discuss such aspects from the perspectives of material innovation, resilience, and energy consumption. First, MD performance is constrained by membrane wetting caused by low surface tension contaminants. Accordingly, omniphobic membranes with high wetting resistance have been used to improve the resilience of MD. Recently, we discovered a trade-off between membrane wetting resistance and water vapor permeability in MD. Such a trade-off, pertaining to the water-air interfacial area, needs to be considered in the design framework of high-performance MD membranes. Second, MD is susceptible to mineral scaling because scalants are accumulated in hypersaline brines. I will elucidate the different mechanisms, behaviors, and mitigation strategies of gypsum and silica scaling, two of the most common scaling in membrane desalination, highlighting the importance of understanding mineral scaling at the molecular level. Third, the economic viability of MD is determined by the availability of low-grade thermal energy, which has not been fully understood in the literature. I will describe our investigation on the feasibility of using waste heat to power MD for on-site and centralized treatment of oil and gas produced water. At the conclusion of the seminar, I will discuss the prospects and research needs associated with MD to improve environmental sustainability at the water-energy nexus.
Bio: Dr. Tiezheng Tong is currently an assistant professor Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Northwestern University in 2015, and then worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Yale University. Dr. Tong holds a B.S. degree (2008) with honors in Environmental Engineering from Beijing Normal University, a M.S. degree (2010) in Environmental Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University, and a second M.S. degree (2011) in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Northwestern University. He is the leading author or co-author of ~50 peer-reviewed journal articles with citation of ~1,800 globally. He is the recipient of several academic and professional awards, including the Young Membrane Scientist Award of North American Membrane Society (2020) and Environmental Chemistry Graduate Student Award from American Chemistry Society (2012). Dr. Tong and his group applies interdisciplinary approach to improve sustainability at the water-energy-health nexus. His research interests include (i) design and development of novel membrane materials and processes for sustainable water supply; (ii) environmental applications and implications of nanotechnology; and (iii) resource recovery from wastewater treatment processes.
TIME Friday, January 29, 2021 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Feb12
EVENT DETAILS
lessEnvironmental Control of Healthcare Associated Infections - How Hygiene Industry Responds to COVID-19 Challenges
Healthcare associated infections (HAIs) represent one of the biggest threats to patient safety globally. Environmental cleaning and disinfection is a critical component in preventing the spread of infections, and undoubtedly it becomes even more important during the COVID19 pandemic. Various disinfection technologies target microorganisms through different mechanisms and have different impacts on pathogens of interest. A successful disinfection technology has several essential components including a high-performing chemical formulation, safer choice of ingredients, and proper applications. As COVID19 puts an unprecedented challenge on the safety of various facilities, the hygiene industry is working collectively and closely with the regulatory agencies to address the surging demand for cleaning and disinfection products and to also support business with tools for safe opening of facilities.
Li obtained his PhD in Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University in 2016, under the supervision of Prof. Aaron Packman. Currently, he is a Principal Scientist at Diversey Inc. which is an industry leader in professional and institutional cleaning and hygiene. His work focuses on developing novel technologies for microbial controls in healthcare and other built environments. His research interests include healthcare associated infections, microbial control technologies, public health and emerging pathogens.
TIME Friday, February 12, 2021 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Feb12
EVENT DETAILS
lessHealthcare innovation has taken off despite — and because of — the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Join us as US business editor for The Economist and Visiting Farley Fellow Vijay Vaitheeswaran moderates a panel discussing the latest advances in the field and how the very process of innovation is being reinvented right now. We’ll cover topics in digital health, including telemedicine, "quantified self" devices, consumer empowerment through smart apps, and back-office automation using robotic process automation and AI. We’ll also explore how the pandemic has led to an evolution in process such as open innovation in pharmaceuticals, an industry which has traditionally been secretive about research and development.
Moderator
Vijay Vaitheeswaran
US business editor for The Economist; Visiting Farley Fellow
PanelistsVivian Lee
Author of The Long Fix: Solving America’s Health Care Crisis; President of Health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences (Alphabet); and senior lecturer at HarvardMilton Morris
Kellogg MBA '04, President & CEO at NeuSpera MedicalJohn Rogers
Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery (and by courtesy Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Chemistry)TIME Friday, February 12, 2021 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CONTACT Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation farley@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
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Feb13
EVENT DETAILS
lessThe CEE department career fair.
Details to follow.
TIME Saturday, February 13, 2021 at 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Feb19
EVENT DETAILS
lessNew Paradigms for Interfaces
Abstract: The research in my group is focused on advancing the science and engineering of interfaces to bridge the fundamental knowledge gap needed to advance the design of advanced materials, and thereby to address the Grand Challenges for Engineering (http://www.engineeringchallenges.org(link is external)). Currently, our interest lies in materials for energy and the environment, as well as in nanoscale science and technology. In my talk I will discuss recent investigations in various arenas. The first part of my talk will be focused on the interfacial properties of 2D materials in aqueous environments with the aim to use these materials for water treatment and sensors, among other applications. The second part of my talk will be dedicated to highly concentrated electrolytes and their implications for green and safe energy storage. A key challenge to investigating and/or engineering precise interfacial behavior stems from the fact that interfaces are buried underneath a bulk phase and involve only a small number of atoms and molecules compared to the bulk. During my talk, I will emphasize some of our recent developments to advance experimental tools to measure interfacial forces, structure, and dynamics of electrolytes in the proximity of solid surfaces.
Biography: Dr. Espinosa-Marzal is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and is affiliated to the department of Materials Science and Engineering. She has a Ph.D. in materials engineering from Hamburg University of Technology (Germany). After her Ph.D., she received an award to promote academic career of young researchers from the German Research Foundation (DFG), which brought her to the Civil and Environmental Engineering department in Princeton University as a research fellow. Prior to joining Illinois, Dr. Espinosa-Marzal spent four years as senior scientist in the laboratory of surface science and technology in the Materials Science Department at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. She has published over seventy peer-reviewed journal articles. In 2016, she was awarded Associate to the Center for Advanced Study at UIUC and Faculty Excellence at her home department to recognize her research activities. She received the Deans Award for Excellence in Research in 2019 and was named Donald Bigger Willet Faculty Scholar by the Grainger College of Engineering in 2020. Since 2016, she serves as member of the executive committee of the Division of Colloids and Surface Chemistry at the American Chemical Society in the role of membership secretary.
TIME Friday, February 19, 2021 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Feb25
EVENT DETAILS
lessMobility Justice as a Means of Pandemic Recovery and Sustainable Mobilities
Abstract
COVID-19 has drastically affected public transportation, driving down ridership by 90% in some cities and threatening its financial viability. At the same time, inequitable transport infrastructure and “transport racism” in the United States has driven racially uneven exposure to the coronavirus as well as sparking the Black Lives Matter protest movements. Unequal mobility regimes are the basis of racial and class-based inequities, health disparities, and segregation -- and has become a life-and-death issue. How can we recover from the pandemic mobility disruption in an equitable way that does not simply entrench these inequities more deeply? This talk will focus on the concept of “Mobility Justice” for challenging the forms of power and inequality that are embedded in the governance and control of all forms of movement. Control over mobility is a form of power that has deep historical roots in colonial racial capitalism. In the United States, both pandemic recovery and sustainable mobility transitions will only succeed if we can overcome the existing system of mobility inequities by designing, promoting, and funding more just mobilities.
Bio
Mimi Sheller, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology, Head of the Sociology Department, and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities and past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. As co-editor with John Urry of Tourism Mobilities (2004) and Mobile Technologies of the City (2006) and author of numerous highly cited articles, she helped establish the “new mobilities paradigm.” She is considered to be a key theorist in critical mobilities research and in Caribbean studies.
Sheller is author or co-editor of twelve books, including Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2020); Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018); Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014); Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Duke University Press, 2012); Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (Routledge, 2003); and Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Macmillan Caribbean, 2000).
She was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa from Roskilde University, Denmark (2015). She has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Macarthur Foundation, the Mobile Lives Forum, and the Graham Foundation in Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
She has held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Miami (2019); the Annenberg School of Communication at University of Pennsylvania (2016); the Penn Humanities Forum (2010); the Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); Media@McGill, Canada (2009); the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2008); and Swarthmore College (2006-2009)
TIME Thursday, February 25, 2021 at 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Mar3
EVENT DETAILS
lessListening to Rock: Acoustic Emission in Fracture Testing
ABSTRACT: Fracture of a material such as rock involves microcracking, which generates elastic waves known as acoustic emission (AE). These transient waves propagate through the medium with very small amplitudes and high frequencies, and the AE signals carry information about the source, including location and mechanism. The acoustic emission technique is reviewed and basic features of the experimental system are outlined. Analyses involving rates, locations, and source mechanisms are discussed, along with imaging results that support the AE statistics. Data from fracture testing of a brittle rock (quartzite) and a brittle solid (glass) are highlighted to demonstrate the ability of AE to monitor the evolution of fracture.
Joseph Labuz is Professor and Department Head of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He earned his PhD (1985) in civil engineering from Northwestern University. His research interests include the behavior of fluid-saturated rock, fracture of brittle solids, and development of novel apparatus. He is a Fellow of ASCE and ARMA.
TIME Wednesday, March 3, 2021 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Mar5
EVENT DETAILS
lessRelating the chemical speciation and chemical forms of technology related metals to their bioavailability
An important challenge in environmental biogeochemistry is the determination of the bioavailability of toxic and essential trace compounds in natural media. For trace metals, it is now clear that chemical speciation must be taken into account when predicting bioavailability. Over the past 30 years, equilibrium models (free ion activity model, biotic ligand model) have been increasingly developed to describe their bioavailability in environmental systems, despite the fact that environmental systems are always dynamic and rarely at equilibrium. In these simple (relatively successful) models, any reduction in the available, reactive species of the metal due to competition, complexation or other reactions will reduce metal bioaccumulation and thus its effects. Recently, it has become clear that biological, physical and chemical reactions occurring in the immediate proximity of the biological surface also play an important role in controlling trace metal bioavailability through shifts in the limiting metal fluxes. This presentation will first discuss the important processes leading to biological uptake in order to make better predictions of metal bioavailability. Lessons learned from the classical metal pollutants are then applied to better understand the bioavailability of emerging contaminants such as the rare earth metals and nanoparticles. Since exposure measurements of nanomaterials in environmental compartments are currently limiting, recent technological advances into the measurement of nanoparticles at low concentrations in complex media will be discussed.
Bio
Kevin Wilkinson is Professor in the Chemistry Department at the University of Montreal since 2005. Prior to that, he was a junior faculty member at the University of Geneva for 10 years. Dr. Wilkinson’s work is in the environmental field, roughly split between the development of analytical techniques and the understanding of environmental processes. Present work examines the bioavailability and mobility of rare earth metals and nanomaterials in environmental (and biological) media. Wilkinson is an Editor of Environmental Chemistry (2010- ), has over 180 publications, over 11,000 citations to his work and an h-index of 59. He has established a world-class laboratory: CACEN-Center for the Analysis and Characterization of Engineered Nanomaterials. He currently leads two major team projects: the NSERC PURE (Pollution in URban Environments) CREATE team (2019-2025) and a major infrastructure project on particulate urban pollution (2020-2023). In 2018, he won the Canadian Institute of Chemistry-Environmental Research Award.TIME Friday, March 5, 2021 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Mar10
EVENT DETAILS
lessUnderstanding and Measuring the Role of Buildings in Community Resilience to Natural Hazards
Abstract
Light-frame wood buildings have historically performed well in earthquakes but there are limitations to how tall they can be constructed. Mass timber provides a unique opportunity to utilize a truly sustainable material while building to more socially needed heights and achieving high levels of seismic performance. This presentation will be being in the context of earthquake engineering with whole building tests of two apartment buildings – one tested in Miki Japan and the other in San Diego; and then a resilient mass timber building. The presentation hypothesis: Can superior building performance alone provide community resilience to earthquakes? To answer this we’ll explore the role of water and power networks that those buildings depend on to function – and then the households who depend on the functionality of physical infrastructure and social institutions. Moving to tornadoes and floods to discuss where the scope of a new modeling environment – the Interdependent Networked COmmunity Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE), and prove or disprove our hypothesis.
Bio
Dr. John W. van de Lindt is the Harold H. Short Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University. Over the last two decades Dr. van de Lindt’s research program has focused on performance-based engineering and test bed applications of building systems for earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes and floods. Van de Lindt led both the NEESWood and NEES-Soft project teams between 2005-2013 which consisted of two-story, four-story, and six-story shake table tests on the world’s largest shake tables, and currently serves as Chair of ASCE’s Executive Committee for the Infrastructure Resilience Division and Secretary of the Executive Committee for the Structural Engineering Institute. Professor van de Lindt current serves as the Co-director for the National Institute of Standards and Technology-funded Center of Excellence (COE) for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning headquartered at Colorado State University and in its sixth year. He has published more than 400 technical articles and reports including more than 200 journal papers, and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Structural Engineering.
TIME Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Mar12
EVENT DETAILS
lessExploring the Microbial Ecology of Our Homes
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in our homes. Although most of these microbes are innocuous, some of these household bacteria and fungi can impact human health. Unfortunately, we have a limited understanding of how and why these household microbial communities vary across geographic regions. I will highlight two projects that leverage the power of ‘citizen science’ to investigate the microbes found inside homes. In the first set of studies, we collected dust samples from ~1,500 households across the U.S. to understand the distributions of airborne bacteria and fungi inside homes. We assessed how airborne microbial communities are influenced by climate, home occupants, and home design. More recently, we have been focusing on those bacteria living inside showerheads. Showerheads can harbor large populations of mycobacteria, a diverse group of bacteria that includes opportunistic pathogens capable of causing nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) lung infections, an increasing threat to public health. To determine how the diversity and abundances of mycobacteria vary spatially and in response to changes in household water chemistry, we recruited >600 volunteer households from across the United States and Europe to sample their showerhead biofilms. We found that showerhead mycobacterial communities vary in composition depending on geographic location, water chemistry, and water source, with households receiving chlorine-treated water having particularly high abundances of certain mycobacteria. Regions where NTM lung infections are most common were the same regions where pathogenic mycobacteria were most prevalent in showerheads, highlighting the likely importance of showerheads in the transmission of NTM infections. Together these results demonstrate the power of a ‘citizen science’-based approach to improve our understanding of those microbes living with us in our homes and their effects on human health.
Noah Fierer is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a microbial ecologist and his research program focuses on microbes living in a range of environments, including those bacteria, fungi, and protists living inside our homes, in soil, on plants, and in the atmosphere. His group uses various approaches, including DNA sequencing and high-throughput cultivation, to explore the diversity and structure of microbial communities, identify the fundamental controls on microbial processes, and examine the mechanisms by which microorganisms influence the health of ecosystems, plants, and animals (including humans). For more information, see: http://fiererlab.org/
TIME Friday, March 12, 2021 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney.acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Mar13
EVENT DETAILS
lessWinter Classes End
TIME Saturday, March 13, 2021
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Mar15
EVENT DETAILS
lessWinter Examinations Begin
TIME Monday, March 15, 2021
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar