News MIT Water Night brings in largest audience to date
April 7, 2018
On World Water Day, March 22nd, the J-WAFS-sponsored MIT Water Club celebrated water research of all kinds with an art and science-filled celebration. MIT faculty, students, and staff joined youth, families, and adults from around the Boston metro area to learn about water through hands-on demos, multimedia art and film, a poster session and a keynote lecture by NASA astronaut and MIT Aero/Astro professor J. A. Hoffman.
Posters and projects were submitted by Boston-area students as well as citizen scientists, and the projects were voted on by a panel of judges. Krithika Ramchander, a MechE PhD student who is working on the J-WAFS Solutions grant-supported xylem water filter won first prize in the Water Technology category. Also among the presenters was J-WAFS’ communications and program manager Andi Sutton, who presented her collaboratively produced public art project on the impacts of sea level rise on Boston’s coastal landscape.
Read below for the full list of exhibit winners:
Water systems
Winner: Kestral Johnson, Understanding Biological Processes through the Microbial Ecology of a Tidal Flow Constructed Wetland for Wastewater Treatment and Water Reuse
Runner-up: Henri Drake, Spatial and temporal structure of Southern Ocean upwelling
Honorable mention: Daniel Duane, Effect of Attenuation due to Multiple Scattering through Fish Shoals on Ecosystem Scale Sensing
Water & society
Winner: Tom Beucler, Jonathan Lin, Syndey Sroka - Preparing MIT for 2050 Floodwaters
Runner-up: Emrat Nur Marzan, Contaminated groundwater flow from Pennsylvania to New York from fracking violation
Honorable mention: Kyle Monahan, Low-cost hurricane damage assessment: using computer vision to detect blue tarps in Puerto Rico
Water technology
Winner: Krithika Ramchander, Development of xylem-based water filters
Runner-up: Janny Cai, Resource recovery from desalination brine: energy efficiency and sodium hydroxide production
Honorable mention: Andrew Bouma, Counterflow reverse osmosis