My name is Xing Xie, an Assistant Professor and Carlton S. Wilder Junior Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. I am Mourin Jarin’s PhD advisor and have known her for over 2 years. I would like to enthusiastically support Mourin Jarin for her application to the Georgia Engineering Foundation Scholarship. I first met Mourin at the 2019 Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization (SNO) Annual Conference in San Diego. SNO is an international organization where I have been an active member for eight years. At that time, Mourin was still an undergraduate student at University of Buffalo, and was one of the few undergraduate students attending the conference. As a tradition of the SNO conference, there was a nano-pitch competition where students could only use 100 seconds to introduce their research to all the attendees during a banquet. I remember that Mourin was the first person to speak, and I was really impressed by her passionate speech. Despite just being an audience member, I could truly feel her love for her research in just 100 seconds. It was a pity that she did not win any prize in the end, but I thought her communication skills were already outstanding, especially as an undergraduate student who was probably attending a professional conference for the first time. I knew that one day she would make up for this regret. On the next day, I got a chance to talk to Mourin and encourage her to apply to our PhD program. I was very happy that she did apply to our program, accepted the offer, and became a PhD student in my group in the fall of 2020. It was a very unusual and difficult time to graduate and start PhD study in a new place during the pandemic. Mourin has always been positive about the challenges she is facing. She was not able to work in the lab last fall semester because of the reduced research capability during the pandemic. So I decided to have her focus on coursework. She did an excellent job in all courses with a 4.0 GPA. But that was clearly not enough to keep her busy. After a short period of time to settle down in the new environment, Mourin proactively asked me what else she could prepare for her PhD study and contribute to the group. So I encouraged her to join the other two students in my group and form a team named VoltaPure. VoltaPure emphasizes the commercialization of a new water disinfection technology developed in my group called LEEFT (Locally Enhanced Electric Field Treatment). LEEFT is a chlorine-free water disinfection technology that aims to use a strong electric field to inactivate pathogens in water. Attributed to her talent for presenting, she quickly became the lead and go to present for the VoltaPure team. In the past few months, VoltaPure has been selected as a finalist for the Water Council Tech Challenge on developing alternative non-chlorine disinfection technologies and won the first GT CEE Entrepreneurial Impact Competition with a $5,000 cash prize. These achievements were not possible without Mourin’s contribution. In Spring 2021, Mourin started to work in the lab. She has been mainly working together with another senior PhD student on a Department of Interior project titled “Salinity Exchange for Low-Cost and High-Quality Potable Water.” Mourin is a quick learner and already has hands-on research experience in her undergraduate. So within a few weeks, she got trained and became confident to work in the lab independently. She has been leading the subject on “Salinity Exchange Electrodialysis” and making promising progress. Briefly, the process transfer salts in seawater to treated low-salinity wastewater, resulting in high-salinity wastewater, which can be discharged to the ocean, and low-salinity seawater, which can be further treated to produce drinking water. This process consumes much less energy than conventional desalination technologies and produces drinking water that is much more cognitively appealing than direct potable reuse of treated wastewater. This work has resulted in a research article published in Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering, and Mourin is the first author. Also in the 2021 Spring semester, Mourin got the second chance to speak in the nano-pitch competition where we first met. Because of the pandemic, the SNO conference was moved online. This time, she had no regrets as she confidently won the first prize. In addition to winning this very competitive prize, Mourin has also been recognized as the Faces of Inclusive Excellence Honoree by our Institute because of her outstanding performance. I am so proud of all the achievements she has made. I believe she will excel no matter what she will do in the future. Mourin successfully passed our PhD qualification exams with excellent performance in Fall 2021. In addition, she has been participating in a NSF I-Corps program as the Entrepreneur Lead of the VoltaPure team to explore the commercialization potential of the LEEFT technology. She led the proposal preparation in the summer. The success of this proposal again indicated her outstanding capability of communication, proposal writing, and teamwork. Mourin also has been in charge of our group activities since 2021. Due to the pandemic, our group members have had much less interaction than before. To keep the cohesiveness of the group, Mo has successfully organized several virtual game nights and outdoor activities (e.g., fruit picking and Nanotechnology Day celebration). She has blended into our group very well, and all the group members like her. Although Mourin is the most junior PhD student in the group, she has really taken the ownership and responsibility of successfully building a positive dynamic in our lab during the pandemic and continued to do so since returning to in-person. In summary, Mourin is truly a self-motivated student, always positive and optimistic, full of passion and enthusiasm. In addition, she is intellectually and emotionally mature, always good-mannered, and very pleasant to work with. I feel excited to have the opportunity to guide her potential to be an independent researcher, scholar, and professor in the future. I hope that you give Mourin Jarin’s application your strongest consideration. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
My name is Xing Xie, an Assistant Professor and Carlton S. Wilder Junior Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. I am Mourin Jarin’s PhD advisor and have known her for over 2 years. I would like to enthusiastically support Mourin Jarin for her application to the Georgia Engineering Foundation Scholarship. I first met Mourin at the 2019 Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization (SNO) Annual Conference in San Diego. SNO is an international organization where I have been an active member for eight years. At that time, Mourin was still an undergraduate student at University of Buffalo, and was one of the few undergraduate students attending the conference. As a tradition of the SNO conference, there was a nano-pitch competition where students could only use 100 seconds to introduce their research to all the attendees during a banquet. I remember that Mourin was the first person to speak, and I was really impressed by her passionate speech. Despite just being an audience member, I could truly feel her love for her research in just 100 seconds. It was a pity that she did not win any prize in the end, but I thought her communication skills were already outstanding, especially as an undergraduate student who was probably attending a professional conference for the first time. I knew that one day she would make up for this regret. On the next day, I got a chance to talk to Mourin and encourage her to apply to our PhD program. I was very happy that she did apply to our program, accepted the offer, and became a PhD student in my group in the fall of 2020. It was a very unusual and difficult time to graduate and start PhD study in a new place during the pandemic. Mourin has always been positive about the challenges she is facing. She was not able to work in the lab last fall semester because of the reduced research capability during the pandemic. So I decided to have her focus on coursework. She did an excellent job in all courses with a 4.0 GPA. But that was clearly not enough to keep her busy. After a short period of time to settle down in the new environment, Mourin proactively asked me what else she could prepare for her PhD study and contribute to the group. So I encouraged her to join the other two students in my group and form a team named VoltaPure. VoltaPure emphasizes the commercialization of a new water disinfection technology developed in my group called LEEFT (Locally Enhanced Electric Field Treatment). LEEFT is a chlorine-free water disinfection technology that aims to use a strong electric field to inactivate pathogens in water. Attributed to her talent for presenting, she quickly became the lead and go to present for the VoltaPure team. In the past few months, VoltaPure has been selected as a finalist for the Water Council Tech Challenge on developing alternative non-chlorine disinfection technologies and won the first GT CEE Entrepreneurial Impact Competition with a $5,000 cash prize. These achievements were not possible without Mourin’s contribution. In Spring 2021, Mourin started to work in the lab. She has been mainly working together with another senior PhD student on a Department of Interior project titled “Salinity Exchange for Low-Cost and High-Quality Potable Water.” Mourin is a quick learner and already has hands-on research experience in her undergraduate. So within a few weeks, she got trained and became confident to work in the lab independently. She has been leading the subject on “Salinity Exchange Electrodialysis” and making promising progress. Briefly, the process transfer salts in seawater to treated low-salinity wastewater, resulting in high-salinity wastewater, which can be discharged to the ocean, and low-salinity seawater, which can be further treated to produce drinking water. This process consumes much less energy than conventional desalination technologies and produces drinking water that is much more cognitively appealing than direct potable reuse of treated wastewater. This work has resulted in a research article published in Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering, and Mourin is the first author. Also in the 2021 Spring semester, Mourin got the second chance to speak in the nano-pitch competition where we first met. Because of the pandemic, the SNO conference was moved online. This time, she had no regrets as she confidently won the first prize. In addition to winning this very competitive prize, Mourin has also been recognized as the Faces of Inclusive Excellence Honoree by our Institute because of her outstanding performance. I am so proud of all the achievements she has made. I believe she will excel no matter what she will do in the future. Mourin successfully passed our PhD qualification exams with excellent performance in Fall 2021. In addition, she has been participating in a NSF I-Corps program as the Entrepreneur Lead of the VoltaPure team to explore the commercialization potential of the LEEFT technology. She led the proposal preparation in the summer. The success of this proposal again indicated her outstanding capability of communication, proposal writing, and teamwork. Mourin also has been in charge of our group activities since 2021. Due to the pandemic, our group members have had much less interaction than before. To keep the cohesiveness of the group, Mo has successfully organized several virtual game nights and outdoor activities (e.g., fruit picking and Nanotechnology Day celebration). She has blended into our group very well, and all the group members like her. Although Mourin is the most junior PhD student in the group, she has really taken the ownership and responsibility of successfully building a positive dynamic in our lab during the pandemic and continued to do so since returning to in-person. In summary, Mourin is truly a self-motivated student, always positive and optimistic, full of passion and enthusiasm. In addition, she is intellectually and emotionally mature, always good-mannered, and very pleasant to work with. I feel excited to have the opportunity to guide her potential to be an independent researcher, scholar, and professor in the future. I hope that you give Mourin Jarin’s application your strongest consideration. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
My name is Xing Xie, an Assistant Professor and Carlton S. Wilder Junior Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. I am Mourin Jarin’s PhD advisor and have known her for over 2 years. I would like to enthusiastically support Mourin Jarin for her application to the Georgia Engineering Foundation Scholarship. I first met Mourin at the 2019 Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization (SNO) Annual Conference in San Diego. SNO is an international organization where I have been an active member for eight years. At that time, Mourin was still an undergraduate student at University of Buffalo, and was one of the few undergraduate students attending the conference. As a tradition of the SNO conference, there was a nano-pitch competition where students could only use 100 seconds to introduce their research to all the attendees during a banquet. I remember that Mourin was the first person to speak, and I was really impressed by her passionate speech. Despite just being an audience member, I could truly feel her love for her research in just 100 seconds. It was a pity that she did not win any prize in the end, but I thought her communication skills were already outstanding, especially as an undergraduate student who was probably attending a professional conference for the first time. I knew that one day she would make up for this regret. On the next day, I got a chance to talk to Mourin and encourage her to apply to our PhD program. I was very happy that she did apply to our program, accepted the offer, and became a PhD student in my group in the fall of 2020. It was a very unusual and difficult time to graduate and start PhD study in a new place during the pandemic. Mourin has always been positive about the challenges she is facing. She was not able to work in the lab last fall semester because of the reduced research capability during the pandemic. So I decided to have her focus on coursework. She did an excellent job in all courses with a 4.0 GPA. But that was clearly not enough to keep her busy. After a short period of time to settle down in the new environment, Mourin proactively asked me what else she could prepare for her PhD study and contribute to the group. So I encouraged her to join the other two students in my group and form a team named VoltaPure. VoltaPure emphasizes the commercialization of a new water disinfection technology developed in my group called LEEFT (Locally Enhanced Electric Field Treatment). LEEFT is a chlorine-free water disinfection technology that aims to use a strong electric field to inactivate pathogens in water. Attributed to her talent for presenting, she quickly became the lead and go to present for the VoltaPure team. In the past few months, VoltaPure has been selected as a finalist for the Water Council Tech Challenge on developing alternative non-chlorine disinfection technologies and won the first GT CEE Entrepreneurial Impact Competition with a $5,000 cash prize. These achievements were not possible without Mourin’s contribution. In Spring 2021, Mourin started to work in the lab. She has been mainly working together with another senior PhD student on a Department of Interior project titled “Salinity Exchange for Low-Cost and High-Quality Potable Water.” Mourin is a quick learner and already has hands-on research experience in her undergraduate. So within a few weeks, she got trained and became confident to work in the lab independently. She has been leading the subject on “Salinity Exchange Electrodialysis” and making promising progress. Briefly, the process transfer salts in seawater to treated low-salinity wastewater, resulting in high-salinity wastewater, which can be discharged to the ocean, and low-salinity seawater, which can be further treated to produce drinking water. This process consumes much less energy than conventional desalination technologies and produces drinking water that is much more cognitively appealing than direct potable reuse of treated wastewater. This work has resulted in a research article published in Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering, and Mourin is the first author. Also in the 2021 Spring semester, Mourin got the second chance to speak in the nano-pitch competition where we first met. Because of the pandemic, the SNO conference was moved online. This time, she had no regrets as she confidently won the first prize. In addition to winning this very competitive prize, Mourin has also been recognized as the Faces of Inclusive Excellence Honoree by our Institute because of her outstanding performance. I am so proud of all the achievements she has made. I believe she will excel no matter what she will do in the future. Mourin successfully passed our PhD qualification exams with excellent performance in Fall 2021. In addition, she has been participating in a NSF I-Corps program as the Entrepreneur Lead of the VoltaPure team to explore the commercialization potential of the LEEFT technology. She led the proposal preparation in the summer. The success of this proposal again indicated her outstanding capability of communication, proposal writing, and teamwork. Mourin also has been in charge of our group activities since 2021. Due to the pandemic, our group members have had much less interaction than before. To keep the cohesiveness of the group, Mo has successfully organized several virtual game nights and outdoor activities (e.g., fruit picking and Nanotechnology Day celebration). She has blended into our group very well, and all the group members like her. Although Mourin is the most junior PhD student in the group, she has really taken the ownership and responsibility of successfully building a positive dynamic in our lab during the pandemic and continued to do so since returning to in-person. In summary, Mourin is truly a self-motivated student, always positive and optimistic, full of passion and enthusiasm. In addition, she is intellectually and emotionally mature, always good-mannered, and very pleasant to work with. I feel excited to have the opportunity to guide her potential to be an independent researcher, scholar, and professor in the future. I hope that you give Mourin Jarin’s application your strongest consideration. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.