Environmental Engineering PhD earns second place in Three-Minute Thesis competition

Seyed Hamed Ghodsi discusses combined sewer overflow onstage at UB's Three Minute Thesis Competition

By Peter Murphy

Published April 9, 2020

"As you may know, rainwater is one of the most valuable resources on the earth,” Seyed Hamed Ghodsi begins his pitch, “on the one hand, it is a source of drinkable water, but it can overwhelm densely populated urban areas, and have negative environmental consequences, like combined sewer overflow.”

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Ghodsi’s earned second place in UB’s fourth annual Three Minute Thesis competition for his pitch on combined sewer overflow (CSO). He discussed problems CSO has for hundreds of cities throughout the United States, including Buffalo. According to Ghodsi, many cities collect runoffs from rainfall in the same pipeline as city sewers. This causes some sewage to flow back into lakes or other bodies of water unfiltered. His research could reduce overflow by 30-40%.

Ghodsi’s work will develop a decision-making tool to help predict and mitigate the amount of CSO volume, and pinpoint where overflow will occur, while also helping municipalities fit these efforts into their budgets. Ghodsi and his advisor Zhenduo Zhu are currently working with the Buffalo Sewer Authority on the early stages of his project.

This is the second consecutive year an environmental engineering PhD candidate from the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering earned one of the top three spots in the university-wide competition. Participants gave their presentations on Friday, March 13 2020.