There is rapidly growing interest in the development of sustainable methods for generating clean energy from waste, clean-up of contaminated wastewaters/soils and recovery of resources from end-of-pipe production processes. The student will be part of research group that focuses on exploiting natural microbial processes and communities to transform potential environmental contaminants and agricultural waste, so they are harmless, ideally converting them to high value products such as bioplastics and (anaerobic digestion) bioenergy. A particular area of expertise is the application physical and chemical applications such as ultrasound and nanomaterials to stimulate and optimise natural microbial processes, and scale-up for real world applications. The exact details of the project will be defined in discussion with the student, but they will have the opportunity to receiving training in environmental and molecular biology, biosensors and engineering approaches.
