EWB Students Win NAE Poster Award

4/22/2010

Students working on clean drinking water project win first place in NAE poster competition.

Written by

Yeh Center
Yeh Center

Students working on an Engineers Without Borders project to bring clean drinking water to a remote community in Guatemala have won first place in the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge Chicago Summit Student Poster Contest. The prize is a check for $500 and a stipend to help send one person to the National Grand Challenges Summit in Los Angeles, Calif., October 5-6.

CEE Assistant Professor Thanh Helen Nguyen mentors the group, which includes about 20 engineering students altogether, many of them from CEE. They are researching, designing, and implementing an innovative household water filtration system that uses iron-amended biosand filters for the town of Socorro, Guatemala.
 
Photo, left to right: Ian Bradley, graduate researcher, with Peter Maraccini and Kimberly Parker, undergraduate project leads.  They are standing behind a concrete biosand filter painted with Mayan designs to appeal to users.  It can produce about 20 liters of clean water every use.

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This story was published April 22, 2010.