SIUE’s Environmental Engineering Graduate Student Nairat Wins 2nd Place at Student Research Competition
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville School of Engineering (SOE) environmental engineering graduate student Shaker Nairat and his team won second place at the 2022 Intelligent Water Systems (IWS) Student Research Competition held in April at the Illinois Wastewater Professionals Conference (IWPC) in Springfield.
With a fellowship from the highly selective Fulbright Foreign Student Program, Nairat came to SIUE in Fall 2021 to pursue a master’s in civil engineering with a specialization in environmental engineering/water resources. Since then, he has worked with two environmental engineering graduate students from Washington University in St. Louis on a research project focused on “Machine Learning and Deep Learning Assisted Phosphorus Concentration Prediction and Anomaly Alarm in a Wastewater Treatment Plant.” They studied how to integrate machine learning, data mining and modeling for improving the performance of wastewater treatment processes.
“Working in a joint team with WashU graduate students on this important research topic that matched my academic and professional interests provided valuable learning opportunities,” said Nairat. “Conducting the research and participating in a competitive student research competition offered unparalleled experience.”
Working with SIUE’s Environmental Resources Training Center (ERTC) and SIUE’s Facilities Management, the team used data collected from the SIUE Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) for case study.
Both SIUE’s Jianpeng Zhou, PhD, professor of environmental engineering in the SOE’s Department of Civil Engineering, and Washington University’s Zhen He, PhD, professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, served as advisors to the team. Notably, the data collection received support from Matt Maas and Rick Lallish of SIUE ERTC, and John Harper of SIUE WWTP.
Upon completing his master’s program, Nairat plans to return to his home country of Palestine to apply his acquired knowledge from SIUE to provide practical and sustainable solutions for solving environmental problems.
Photo: SIUE School of Engineering environmental engineering graduate student Shaker Nairat.
