Published March 11, 2024
On Friday, March 1, 2024, the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition celebrated PhD students' exciting research by cultivating their academic, presentation, and research communication skills. Participants were judged on their ability to effectively convey the essence and importance of their research engagingly to a non-specialist audience in just 3 minutes, with one PowerPoint slide.
CBE's Ameya Tandel presented his research on using advanced water filters and membranes for textile wastewater where he was voted second place and received a prize of $1,500. You can watch his winning presentation on YouTube.
Turning Murky to Clear: Unveiling Pure Water with Membrane Magic!
Advisor: Dr. Haiqing Lin
Biography: Ameya, from Mumbai, India, is on a mission to develop advanced water filters and membranes for textile wastewater treatment to provide drinkable water to society. In 2022 alone, 100 billion new clothes were produced, with 10,000 tons of dyes, and the existing filters or membranes lack good water purification properties for such a high volume of wastewater. To put it in perspective, 1,800 gallons of water are used to make one pair of jeans, contributing to two billion liters of textile dye wastewater. Ameya is determined to make a difference by developing and engineering surface-modified graphene oxide (GO) based filters or membranes for water purification. If he can connect just 1,000 membrane filters, it can purify eight million liters of wastewater in one year, and 250 membrane purification plants with 1,000 membrane filters can treat the whole two billion liters of textile wastewater produced in a year. When not researching, he enjoys dancing, playing video games and watching movies. Ameya plans to work as a research scientist in a company whose products directly impact human society and donate to schools and colleges in underdeveloped and developing countries.