EEES Internship and Job Postings

Month: January 2023

PhD Position in Environmental Biotechnology

January 31, 2023

Job Type Graduate
Job Rank PhD Student
Job Institution University of South Alabama
Job Description:
The Chemical and Bio-molecular Engineering Program at the University of South Alabama, Mobile Al, is looking for two highly motivated Doctoral candidates starting in August 2023.

The first position involves modeling the performance and microbial communities of Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactors (AnMBR) treating domestic wastewater.

The second position involves developing protein-based adsorbents for contaminant removal.

The project is headed by Dr. Kaushik Venkiteshwaran, Assistant Professor in Civil, Coastal and Environment Engineering at South Alabama, and will serve as the academic and research advisor for the candidates.

Successful candidates will join the Chemical and Bio-molecular Engineering Program at South Alabama, and will receive a doctoral degree in Chemical and Bio-molecular Engineering upon completion.

Research duties include:
Project-1
1) Building and operating lab-scale AnMBRs
2) Perform typical water/wastewater analyses
3) Perform microbial community analysis and bioinformatics
4) Perform computational modeling

Project-2
1) Isolate target DNA, design primers, perform gene cloning and cultivate bacterial cultures
2) Performing adsorption experiments

Required qualifications:
1) Bachelors in Civil or Chemical Engineering or related fields from a verifiable Institution
2) Masters in Civil or Chemical Engineering or related fields from a verifiable Institution

3) GRE: >151 in Verbal and Quantitative

4) For international students, an official TOEFL, IELTS, iTEP, or Pearson (PTE Academic) score is required.  The minimum required test scores are: TOEFL – 525 on the paper version, 197 on the computer version, or 71 on the internet version; IELTS – 6.0; iTEP – 3.7; Pearson’s (PTE Academic) – 48

Preferred qualification (Highlight any of the following in your CV or SOP)
1) Experience in operating biological reactors
2) Experience in performing typical water/wastewater analyses
3) Experience in performing microbial analyses (Plating, Genetic cloning, DNA/RNA extraction, PCRs etc.)
4) Experience in using statistical softwares (such as R, Matlab, Python etc.)
5) Writing experience – Share journal publications or conference proceedings if any.

Interested candidates should contact Dr. Venkiteshwaran (kvenkiteshwaran@southalabama.edu) via email with your Statement of Purpose (SOP), CV and transcripts  before February 28th 2023. You can also direct any questions to Dr. Venkiteshwaran

Grad Students Interested in Engineering Education

January 27, 2023

Dear Students,

 

I hope your spring term is off to a good start. I’m writing because I have funding available to support a graduate student who is interested in pursuing an MS/PhD in Engineering Education.

Between my colleagues in the Experiential Engineering Education department and I, we have funding for five graduate students to start in Fall 2023/Spring 2024. The project that I have funding for involves implementing and evaluating an intervention to support low-income engineering students via a living-learning community and a leadership development program. More information is available at the NSF site: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2221511&HistoricalAwards=false

 

Details regarding the Experiential Engineering Education graduate program are available here: https://engineering.rowan.edu/programs/exeed/graduate/ . Our department and program are relatively new and have been intentionally created to provide a supportive and enriching community for students and faculty.   

 

If you do know of anyone who might be interested, if you could send them my way, I would be very appreciative.

 

Thanks so much!

Kaitlin

 

Kaitlin Mallouk, PhD (she/her/hers)

https://www.name-coach.com/kaitlin-mallouk

Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator

Experiential Engineering Education

2022-2023 Provost Fellow for Faculty Development

Engineering Hall 233

Rowan University

mallouk@rowan.edu

Office: 856-256-5387

Text/Voice: 856-347-0559

LGBTQIA+ Safe Zone

Three Ph.D. positions, Virginia Tech

January 27, 2023

Dr. Zhiwu (Drew) Wang’s lab in Virginia Tech is recruiting three Ph.D. students to begin in Fall 2023 for the three projects described below.  Detailed information about application submission can be seen at https://aeesp.org/jobs/3015

1.Characterization of variability in MSW streams to identify critical material attributes for fuel production

A PhD or a MS student will be supported by this DOE project to understand the characteristics critical to turning low-cost, abundant municipal solid waste (MSW) into conversion-ready feedstocks for producing biofuels through gasification and solid-state anaerobic digestion (SS-AD) as targeted thermal and biological conversion technologies. Since this is a joint project among seven organizations, the candidate working on this DOE project will have the opportunity to learn collaborative skills between universities, national labs, and industrial partners. Candidates with experience in solid waste management are especially encouraged.

2.Pilot-scale bioplastic product fermentation and manufacturing from food wastes

A PhD will be supported by this USDA-funded project to convert a variety of food wastes to Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) which will be furthered processed into commercial grade bioplastic products such as flexible wrapping films or hard plastic containers that can not only be readily biodegradable in engineered systems but also in natural environments such as backyard composting or in the ocean. Candidates with experience in up-scaled biological processing and real-world research are especially welcomed.

3.Partial denitrification anammox technology for mainstream wastewater nitrogen removal

A Ph.D. or a M.S. student will be supported by this industrial project. The study will be performed in the Northern Virginia campus with the goal to achieve low energy and low carbon biological nitrogen removal from real municipal wastewater through a smart automatic controlling system. The success of this biotechnology would promote anammox technology into the full-scale application in mainstream wastewater treatment processes.

 

Resources for the Future Summer Research Internship Program

January 25, 2023

Summer 2023 Research Intern Applications Are OPEN!

Do you want to begin a career in academic or policy research? Are you interested in contributing to impactful, balanced research that is aimed at improving environmental, energy and natural resource decisions? A summer research internship with Resources for the Future (RFF) might be right for you. The RFF summer internship program provides an opportunity for students to prepare for careers that engage in academic and policy-relevant research. Interns are essential members of the RFF Research and Policy Engagement team. They are responsible for providing technical support that, under the direction of RFF Fellows, allows for the production of compelling and impactful research that aligns with RFF’s mission of improving environmental, energy and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement.

Internships will run from June 12, 2023 to August 18, 2023. Start or end dates can be changed with an approved exception. All internships will be conducted in RFF’s offices in Washington, DC. Applications for the summer 2023 hiring season will close on March 17th, with interviews conducted by April 21st. Hiring decisions will be made by May 5th.

Summer 2023 Projects that will be supported by a summer intern include:

  • Advances and Challenges in Decarbonizing the Aviation Sector. The aviation sector contributes around 5 percent of global greenhouse gases, and demand for air travel is expected to triple by 2050. Decarbonizing the aviation sector is vital in achieving a net zero economy. This project aims to identify the advances and challenges in decarbonizing the aviation sector.
  • Exploring New Proposals for Energy Markets for Tomorrow’s Grid. As the electricity sector decarbonizes and reliance on variable renewable resources grows, electricity markets will face increasing price fluctuations and a more diverse generation mix. While there may be increased opportunity for cost savings, markets may also need new structures to keep dispatchable resources on-line or encourage new investment to meet the demand from increasing electrification. In this research project the summer intern will explore different proposals for helping to ensure reliable service in an increasingly decarbonized system and important tradeoffs between longer term mechanisms to encourage investment and the role that energy price variation can play in activating flexible electricity demand among other issues.
  • Evaluation of Justice40 Implementation. The Justice40 initiative mandates that at least 40% of the benefits of certain federal government programs go to disadvantaged communities. Exactly which programs are covered and how the mandate is implemented has been left to individual agencies. This project would take stock of J40 implementation, summarizing how several federal agencies are defining “disadvantaged” and measuring “benefits”, and to the extent possible, summarizing early outcomes.
  • Modeling the Distributional Effects of Climate Policy. This project will update, improve, and expand RFF’s Social Welfare Incidence Model, a microsimulation model of the distributional impacts of climate policies (Gordon et al. 2015).  This model has been used to evaluate the distributional impact of carbon pricing across states (Williams et al. 2014) and income groups (Williams et al. 2015), and to look at the costs of other environmental policies including the Inflation Reduction Act (Roy et al. 2022). The project will complete an update to latest possible data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, State Energy Demand System, and other sources. We will then calculate expenditures shares across demographic groups, downscaling regional expenditure patterns to the state level building on state income and expenditure data. We will also build a model map to improve transparency and useability. As time allows, we will apply the model to policy scenarios involving decarbonization of the transportation and electricity sectors.
  • Effects of Weather Extremes on the Value of Outdoor Recreation. Increasingly frequent days with extreme temperature have potential to diminish the value of outdoor recreation and disrupt the outdoor recreation economy, which accounts for approximately 2 percent of US GDP. This project will make use of daily campground reservation and cancellation data over a ten-year period to estimate revealed preferences toward temperature extremes among federal campground users. We seek an intern with skills in econometric analysis and data visualization (including mapping) to complete a new analysis using the RFF Weather Variability Explorer (WeaVE) tool and a previously assembled and cleaned data set on campground use.
  • Economic and Workforce Development Policy in the Energy Transition. The intern will help RFF review literature on lessons from various US federal, tribal, regional, and state-based economic and workforce development programs to identify key lessons that could be relevant for the energy transition. These reviews will focus on programs intended to support a displaced workforce or underserved communities.
  • Improving a Leading Electricity Sector Environmental Policy Analysis Model. This project will develop new features for RFF’s E4ST model that include a representation of the generation capacity reserve requirements in each region of the US, and representations of the proposed and potential wind farms off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States, including their capacities, locations, and locations of connections to the existing power grid.
  • Assessing Potential Future Changes in Critical Minerals Prices & the Implications for EVs. The project is part of a broader assessment of driving forces for critical minerals supplies and prices, and the implications for costs of electric vehicle (EV) batteries and the vehicles themselves. Using engineering and economics related information collected by RFF about those driving forces and their implications, supplemented as needed by additional data collection, the intern will conduct an empirical analysis of prospective changes in future mineral prices and the knock-on effects for battery and vehicle costs.  The empirical analysis may entail a mix of statistical estimation and use of bottom-up models for battery production into which changes in mineral prices can be incorporated.

Capital District Scholarship Application Form – Water Environment Association of South Carolina

January 20, 2023

2023 Capital District Scholarship Application – Approved by EC (Fillable) Capital District Scholarship FY23-24 School Ad

Please see attached flyer for scholarship application and instructions.  If you have any questions, please contact Betsy Catchings, bcatchings@caycesc.gov
WEASC Capital District Scholarship Committee Chair.

DEADLINE: Applications must be received by April 1, 2023

IMET Undergraduate Summer Internship

January 11, 2023

IMET Undergraduate Summer Internship
June 5, 2023 – August 4, 2023
Apply by February 10, 2023 for best consideration

Marine and environmental sciences are crucial for the future of human health, food, water and energy. The nine-week internship connects you to a hands-on research project. Interns will receive an orientation to working in a lab, seminars on molecular techniques relevant to fisheries, aquaculture, energy production, and environmental research. Group activities will promote science communication, professional and life skill development.

IMET and UMCES are committed to creating opportunities for a diverse body of undergraduates to enable and encourage students from underserved communities to continue on to higher degrees and careers in marine and environmental science.

Internship Benefits: This full time internship includes a stipend of $5,400 for the nine-week period. IMET intends to provide no-cost summer housing for students from outside the Baltimore metropolitan area.

Internship Eligibility: This internship is most applicable to undergraduate students studying biology, marine science, environmental science, and other related degrees. (Preference will be given to rising juniors and seniors.)

Students from educational backgrounds with limited access to research opportunities and students from underserved communities with an interest in marine science and environmental science are welcomed and encouraged to apply.

https://www.umces.edu/imet/summer-internship

SCAWWA/WEASC Scholarships

January 10, 2023

WEASC and SCAWWA have an excellent scholarship opportunity with an application deadline of January 15th. In some years every student who applies receives a scholarship. They literally have money they are trying to give away. Info at https://www.scwaters.org/general/custom.asp?page=Scholarships

 

You need to be a member to apply. You can accomplish that in several ways, some of which are described online. One way not described online is that you can fill out this form and send $10 to the Clemson AWWA-WEF Student Chapter Treasurer, Anna Delahunt adelahu@g.clemson.edu. Submitting the form and sending the $10 will get you membership in the national AWWA, national WEF, state SCAWWA, and state WEASC. (It’s a lot easier and less expensive than doing all those online).

DAVID A. LADNER, PhD, PE

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Department of Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences

College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences

Clemson University

 

342 Computer Court

Anderson, SC 29625

o 864-656-5572

ladner@clemson.edu

SCDNR-Conservation Districts Field Positions

January 9, 2023

We are excited to announce our two new SCDNR-Conservation Districts Section Field Positions are currently open for application! These positions will directly serve Conservation Districts (one in the upstate and one in the low state). While the positions will be on the road quite a bit, their physical office location will be at 5 Geology Road in Columbia. The application period closes on January 17 at 5pm.

Link to job announcement: https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/sc/jobs/3856951/program-coordinator-ii-multiple-positions-available

Middlebury School of the Environment Scholarship Opportunity Summer Program

January 3, 2023

In Summer 2023, the School of the Environment will take place on the campus of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

Monterey, California, is a microcosm of the world’s environmental challenges and an exemplar of  sustainability planning. This summer, build your capacities for problem solving and leadership in Monterey with the Middlebury School of the Environment.

For six weeks Monterey will be our laboratory for exploring the world’s most pressing needs. For example:

  • Climate resilience
  • Food Justice
  • Restoration of marine ecosystems
  • Urban sustainability
  • Political and social commitment to change

Monterey, California, exists at two poles. On one hand, it is among the wealthiest communities in the United States. It’s progressive environmental ethic is visible through plentiful organic foods and farms, easy access to nature and wilderness, renewable energy development, electric car charging stations, outstanding outdoor recreation opportunities, a multitude of environmental organizations and other common symbols of environmental progress.

On the other hand, as the breadbasket of America, environmental impacts from farming are severe. Water is in short supply and drought conditions persist. Working conditions for farm laborers are substandard. Inequality also runs high, as pockets of wealth and poverty exist side-by-side. Monterey Bay’s marine ecosystem is world class, but the pacific garbage patch swirls just a few miles off the coast. And every summer wildfires burn in the mountains.

At the Middlebury School of the Environment, we welcome complexity. We see two Monterey, Californias. The first, bucolic and sustainable. The other, challenged by wicked problems.

The dichotomy visible in Monterey highlights the principle challenge that we face as environmental leaders. That is, weaving multiple realities into one, united around our common planet. Join us in summer 2023 to develop your skill set for meeting this goal.

The Middlebury School of the Environment offers a six-week place-based curriculum in sustainability and leadership. You will earn credit for three Middlebury College courses which are transferable back to your home institution.

View the gallery in a new window.Open Gallery  | 9 images

Start your application

Dates

June 9 – July 21

Students should await specific instructions before purchasing airline tickets.

Fees

The fee is $10,900 per student, which includes instructional expenses, accommodation, field trip expenses, breakfasts and dinners.

There will be financial aid available on a first come, first served basis. Funding does run out, so apply early!

Please note: the Middlebury Institute of International Studies grants affiliation scholarships for graduate students who have already attended other Middlebury programs. If you are interested in pursuing an eventual graduate degree at MIIS, your participation on the Middlebury School of the Environment would automatically make you eligible for a scholarship of $5,000.

Housing

Students will live in a newly-renovated dorm, a ten minute walk from the MIIS campus and within easy walking distance to grocery stores and restaurants. The dorm has double rooms and plenty of shared space for cooking and socializing.

An artist's rendering of a dorm

Start your application

U.S. Forest Service is Hiring Student Interns

January 3, 2023

Make a lasting impact on the world around you and unlock opportunities for professional growth and career advancement. Join the Forest Service and be a part of an organization that is committed to caring for the land and serving people. Our mission is to protect our natural resources for multiple uses for today and future generations.

The Forest Service is hiring temporary student interns across the nation. Internships are available in a variety of exciting and rewarding opportunities, such as social sciences, administrative support, natural resources, engineering, and other foundational fields.

To learn about career opportunities, benefits, hiring events, and resources to help with the application process., visit the Forest Service Jobs webpage https://www.fs.usda.gov/working-with-us/jobs/recruitment-and-hiring.

Applications are only accepted through www.usajobs.gov December 28, 2022, through January 11, 2023. Review the job announcement carefully for deadlines and required information to include in your application.

For information regarding employment opportunities with USDA Forest Service – Savannah River contact Savannah River Public Affairs Specialist Joe Orosz at josef.orosz@usda.gov.