Lauren Barton Wins Graduate Student Award

Lauren Barton, a CEINT PhD candidate at Duke University received the 2013 Jeffrey B. Taub Environmental Engineering Graduate Student Award. The Jeffrey B. Taub Award is an Engineering Departmental award "presented annually by the environmental engineering graduate students to a current student who best exhibits Jeff (Taub)'s maturity of thought and independence, and who best integrates past training with the environmental engineering profession."

Lauren’s work focuses on Theme 1: Exposure: Transport and Transformations and Core C: Modeling and Risk Assessment. Through her doctoral studies, she aims to combine experimental and computational methods to predict environmentally relevant concentrations of NPs in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and Land application uses (LAUs). Her experimental efforts probe the distribution and transformation of NPs in environmental matrices like wastewater sludge. Computationally she has developed probabilistic exposure models that track NP fate and transport through WWTPs into effluent and biosolids and then through biosolid application to agricultural lands.

Lauren is currently finishing her dissertation, "Fate and Transformation of Metal-Oxide NPs in Wastewater Treatment," after which she plans to take a postdoctoral position at Rice University. Having been awarded a 2011 Chateaubriand Fellowship to conduct research at a French Institution, she is co-advised by Mark Wiesner at Duke University and Jean-Yves Bottero and Melanie Auffan at the CEREGE, Université Aix-Marseille.