Bezawit Getachew
Assistant Professor in Environmental Engineering
Research Faculty, NSF NEWT Center
SURF Mentoring
Potential projects/topics: The project will be in the broad area of self-healing materials. Researchers will learn how to make polymeric self-healing materials and characterize their performance. They will also be asked to help with reading the recent literature in this area and summarizing the findings in written form.
Potential skills gained: Laboratory work. Reading and summarizing scientific papers critically.
Required qualifications: Students should have taken at least one chemistry lab at Rice. Students from CEVE, CHBE, CHEM, MECH, and MSNE are all welcome!
Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I., Graduate Student
Research Areas
Dr. Getachew’s research focuses on understanding the performance of “smart materials” in the context of water treatment technologies and systems. Smart materials, also called responsive materials, undergo significant physico-chemical changes in response to external stimuli. Their dynamic behavior can be used for sensing, actuating, self-healing, and controlled-release applications, among many others. Smart materials could play a role in enhancing the versatility and sustainability of water treatment technologies and systems but advances in the design and synthesis of such functional materials are currently focused on and driven by applications outside the environmental engineering field. Research in Dr. Getachew’s lab aims to 1) evaluate the performance of different kinds of smart materials in environmentally relevant conditions, 2) integrate them into water treatment technologies and assess their performance against state-of-the-art technologies, and 3) design new materials and composite structures to enable previously unavailable functionalities.
