Manish Kumar

CEEAA Young Alumni Achievement Award, 2015

For technical excellence and outstanding contributions in the new area of developing water treatment membranes that utilize biological water transport proteins and that promise to revolutionize water treatment by decreasing the amount of energy required for desalination; and for his studies to optimize synthesis of hybrid membranes and produce them in a flat sheet format, essential steps on the path to commercialization of this technology.

Biography

Manish Kumar had the pleasure of attending graduate school twice at Illinois, graduating once with a MS in Environmental Engineering in 2000 and then with a PhD in 2010. Between the two degrees he spent time in a small consulting firm (NCS Engineering) in Phoenix, AZ and at MWH Global’s Applied Research Department in Southern California. He was involved in a variety of cutting edge projects on implementing membranes for water and wastewater treatment. This exciting research experience and stimulating interactions with students and colleagues eager to learn about membranes convinced him that a career in academia would be most satisfying. He also decided to “do something original” with his PhD and arrived back in Urbana in 2006. His idea was to integrate biological channels that transport water very efficiently into water treatment membranes. This idea was quite radical at that time but the idea proved feasible with some persistence and lot of excellent support from his advisors (Mark Clark and Julie Zilles). Since this initial work, the area of biomimetic membranes for water purification has become widely studied and there is already a product on the market based on this idea.  

After completing his PhD, Kumar moved to Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow and worked on determining the atomic structure of protein channels using electron microscopy. He moved to The Pennsylvania State University as an Assistant Professor in 2011. His group is pioneering the use of artificial water channels for synthesizing membranes for applications, using synthetic biology to prevent fouling of membranes and continuing to develop methods to characterize and utilize protein channels in engineering and healthcare applications. 

Manish enjoys long distance running and spending time with his wife Anu and twins Arun and Sierra. Arun and Sierra were born in Urbana and let everybody know that they are from Illinois.