Congratulations to former Chair student Sabrina Bedjera for receiving first place in AWWA’s (American Water Works Association) Academic Achievement Awards competition for Masters theses! This Award encourages academic excellence by recognizing contributions to the field of public water supply.
From Sept. 2015 until Jan. 2019 Sabrina worked on her MASc at the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Water Treatment at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Sigrid Peldszus. Her research focused on “Predicting the Removal of Micropollutants in Lake Ontario and Grand River Water Using Ozonation”, a project which she conducted in collaboration with 3 partner municipalities running drinking water treatment plants.
The main objective of Sabrina Bedjera’s research was to predict the degradation of selected micropollutants under conditions experienced at participating full-scale drinking water treatment plants so that utilities could incorporate this knowledge in their planning processes. To achieve this goal, Ms. Bedjera adapted a scientifically established model to incorporate the conditions experienced at the partner plants, validated the model against experimentally obtained degradation data for atrazine, and finally ran simulations for micropollutants, which were of specific interest to the participating utilities. Simulated pollutants included cyanotoxins, cannabis compounds, atrazine and BTEX. Overall, Ms. Bedjera’s results helped the collaborating utilities to proactively plan for optimization of their ozonation process and other potential upgrades for their drinking water treatment processes. More details on this research can be found in Sabrina’s thesis: http://hdl.handle.net/10012/14362
Sabrina was a student member of AWWA throughout her studies at UW. Last year she joined the OWWA Young Professionals Committee, and hopes to stay involved with OWWA in the future. In the fall she will start her training as a policy analyst with Natural Resources Canada.
