Bezawit Getachew
Assistant Professor in Environmental Engineering
Research Faculty, NSF NEWT Center
SURF Mentoring
Potential projects/topics: Research in our lab focuses on materials used for water treatment and distribution. Active project that SURF students can participate in include 1) designing more selective and more robust membranes for treating hypersaline brines used for lithium mining; 2) membranes whose surface is electroactive and can be used to clean the membrane on demand. Students can also explore smart, self-healing materials that can recover from damage autonomously. We are working on monitoring contaminants that could be released from such materials.
Potential skills gained: Students will learn to use sensitive conductivity meters, (transmission) electron microscopes, potentiostat. Students will also get experience analyzing data from these instruments, experimental design, and communication skills.
Required qualifications: Students should have taken at least one chemistry lab.
Direct mentor: 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.
