April 04, 2023

Two civil and environmental engineering students at Mizzou received awards for posters presented at the joint annual meeting of the 2023 Missouri Section of the American Water Works Association (MO-AWWA) and the Missouri Water Environment Association.

Both students work under the guidance of Assistant Professor Maryam Salehi, whose research focuses on plastic pollutant fate and heavy metal transport—work she brought to Mizzou from the University of Memphis this past fall.  

“This was my team’s first time attending the MO-AWWA conference, and we were thrilled to receive recognition for our research,” Salehi said. “It was also a great opportunity to network with industry and other water experts from around the state.”

Of five total MO-AWWA awards, Salehi’s team took three.

Mizzou student winners include two PhD students:

• Dibya Kanti Datta, who took second place in the Wastewater Track for his poster, which focused on heavy metal-microplastic-sediment interaction in urban stormwater runoff, and

• Anandu Nair, who took third place in the Water Track for his poster on producing novel nanofibrous media for microplastics removal from water.

Additionally, a former student of Salehi’s also placed. Md Hadiuzzaman, a PhD student at the University of Memphis and a research scholar at Mizzou, took second place in the water track for research on the accumulation of lead in plastic pipes.

The MO-AWWA/MWEA Joint Annual Meeting was held in late March at the Lake of the Ozarks.

Learn more about Salehi’s research here.