By the Department of Chemical Engineering
Two Chemical Engineering graduate students have won a nationwide video contest focused on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Carlo Cunanan, a master’s student, and Kiyoumars Zarshenas, a PhD student, are among the six winners of the Science, Action! initiative, which is a collaboration between the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologies (FRQNT).
The winners were chosen based on their videos' ability to highlight the impact of their engineering research on sustainable development goals.
“NSERC is proud to showcase some of the remarkable research that Canadian universities are doing in the basic sciences to find solutions to the most urgent problems that our society is facing, such as climate change,” said NSERC’s president Alejandro Adem in a media release. “These important research efforts not only will lead to the development of tools to facilitate better decision-making but also provide unique opportunities to train the highly qualified personnel of tomorrow in the essential skills that they will need to ensure a better, sustainable future.”
Cunanan, a researcher in the Greener Production Group, is striving to develop greener ammonia production methods to combat climate change through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Professor Xiao Yu Wu who is cross appointed to the Department of Chemical Engineering is Cunanan’s supervisor and director of the group.
“Ammonia is a chemical that is used for energy storage. Presently ammonia production is greenhouse gas intensive, our group is finding ways to produce ammonia in cleaner and more cost-effective ways,” says Cunanan. “My project is interdisciplinary, I have a supervisor in economics too, Water Institute member Professor Alain-Desire Nimubona so it’s engineering intersecting with economics to produce this green ammonia project.”
Zarshenas’ research, supervised by Water Institute member Professor Zhongwei Chen, focuses on membrane-based water purification technologies which contribute to solving the global water crisis.
“My research aims to make the desalination process more efficient by addressing challenges related to the preparation of the composite membrane. We are developing an ultra-thin membrane to be stable in high-pressure systems,” says Zarshenas, who hopes to leverage this win to create a start-up.