Two-year postdoc in resource recovery from water treatment waste and nano-scale chemical processes

The postdoc will be part of the Department of Geochemistry and will work closely with a senior researcher on a project funded by the Independent Research Council of Denmark’s Green Transition call. The project broadly involves developing new technologies to detoxify and recover resources from the residual solid waste produced from drinking water treatment. Specifically, the project attempts to create a series of chemical and electrochemical methods to transform and valorise the arsenic-rich iron oxide precipitates generated as a by-product of removing arsenic, a potent carcinogen, from groundwater used as a drinking water source. Since groundwater arsenic contamination impacts millions of people in both high- and low-income regions, the developed resource recovery methods are expected to be relevant in a variety of geographic regions with different socioeconomic characteristics.

Based on the potentially wide range of methods that can be used to recover resources from this waste stream, a variety of expertise can contribute to this project. Therefore, qualified postdoc applicants can have diverse technical backgrounds, including environmental and chemical engineering, soil and surface chemistry, geochemistry, and materials science.

The postdoc is expected to contribute to several of the following functions related to the project’s key aims. In the application, please specify the functions you are most interested and able to contribute in and why:

• Design and execute laboratory and field (Denmark and South Asia) experiments with support from our technical staff.
• Perform experiments to separate arsenic from the solid matrix of iron oxide precipitates via chemical or electrochemical methods.
• Use biological, chemical, or electrochemical methods to transform residual arsenic into a less toxic and more stable form and to transform residual iron into magnetite.
• Characterize the pathways of the transformation reactions using synchrotron-based X-ray techniques (X-ray absorption spectroscopy, high-energy X-ray scattering).
• Lead the write up of experimental and field results in peer reviewed scientific journals.