Featured Awards – March 2015

‌‌Jonathan Cutler (Mathematical Sciences, CSAM) was awarded $19,473 by the National Security Agency for “Enumerative extremal problems – Year 1,” which will gather problems and potential tools in order to answer a wide range of open questions in the area of extremal enumeration.

Pankaj Lal (Earth & Environmental Studies, CSAM) received a $10,000 subcontract from the New Jersey Institute of Technology for the NJ Department of Environmental Protection-funded project “Assessment of Economic, Ecological, and Social Capital in Congruence with Design Studies for Reducing Storm Surge and Flooding Risks to New Jersey Coastal Communities – Supplement.” Tasks include preparing ecosystem inventories, maximizing the use of green infrastructure to mitigate flooding, and guiding engineering design principles by adopting a systems approach to minimize risk while also addressing “cumulative” impacts.

Saumik Panja (Ph.D. student, Environmental Management) and Yang Deng and Dibyendu Sarkar (Earth & Environmental Studies) received a $5,000 award from the New Jersey Water Resources Research Institute for “Developing a green technology to remove phosphate and pharmaceuticals from wastewater effluent.” This project will evaluate the performance of a “green”, cost- and energy-efficient phytoremediation technology – the Vetiver System (VS) – utilizing a fast growing, high biomass grass, namely vetiver (Chrysopogon zizanioides) in removing phosphate and pharmaceuticals (in addition to traditional wastewater pollutants) from treated wastewater, for the purpose of water reuse.

Rebecca Shell (Ph.D Student, Environmental Management) and Robert Prezant (Dean, CSAM) were awarded $5,000 by the New Jersey Water Resources Research Institute for “Effects of hard clam (Mercenaria mercenaria) grow-out operations on benthic communities in Barnegat Bay, NJ” which will study the effect that the filtering capability of hard clams on local communities in Barnegat Bay, an impacted, eutrophic, lagoonal estuary.

David Talaga (Chemistry & Biochemistry, CSAM) was awarded $283,164 by the National Institutes of Health for the project “Interfacially activated aggregation of alpha-synuclein” which will investigate the influence of interfaces on the aggregation of α-synuclein—which has been implicated in the progression of Parkinson’s Disease—into amyloid fibrils.