Nitrogen overload

Working in a biogeochemistry lab means spending a lot of time thinking about the nitrogen cycle and its many pools and flows both in class and in the field.

As I clearly couldn't get enough, I got to apply all that newfound knowledge to my internship at DC Water this summer in the wastewater treatment research & development department.

That's right, I ditched the Sunshine state already to head back to my first love, Washington DC.

DC Water owns one of the largest and most advanced wastewater treatment plants in the world, processing on average more than 300 million gallons (and up to 1 billion at peak times!!) of wastewater from Washington DC as well as parts of Maryland and Virginia before sending treated effluent into the Potomac River (which I definitely swam in more than once while I was at AU).

I was lucky enough to get to work with both Haydee de Clippelier, the lab PI, and a PhD mentor, Rahil Fofana, to create and optimize denitrification filters that could be used in the plant to speed up the wastewater treatment process. These filters were meant to create ideal conditions for the proliferation of "Anammox" bacteria or Anaerobic Ammonium-Oxidizing bacteria that are super awesome because they shortcut the nitrogen cycle and can transform ammonium into nitrogen gas without first converting it to nitrite or nitrate.

Lost?

That's okay, so was I pretty much up until the last day. What the job really entailed was running wastewater (yum) through different media (think sands, rocks) that was sometimes coated with yummy micronutrients (like iron) to provide shelter and food for the bacteria to grow.

This process could ultimately save both space, time, and resources (think money, equipment) for large plants but also smaller plants that can't afford what's currently on the market. This means more efficient nitrogen processing globally saving my good friends, streams and wetlands, from eutrophication.

Check out the poster below for more information about this project and some of the other ones happening at the plant below.

While I loved my time at DC Water, especially because of how immediately research could be applied to real problems in industry, it was definitely time to stop smelling like sewage and get back to Tampa!