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Rutgers University in Newark will lead a $5 million, five-year, multiple-school Garden State Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (GS-LSAMP) program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Alexander E. Gates is GS-LSAMP’s co-principal investigator and project director. Please see link for details.
New Funding to Support Biogeophysics Research at Rutgers-Newark
Lee Slater and Dimitrios Ntarlagiannis have been active in securing new funding to support continued biogeophysics research at Rutgers-Newark.
US Department of Energy Awards:
Our department has received two new awards (starting September 1, 09) from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Environment Science Remediation Program (ERSP) focusing on the emerging field of biogeophysics. In collaboration with Camelia Prodan at New Jersey Institute of Technology and Susan Hubbard at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Lee Slater & Dimitrios Ntarlagiannis are studying the dielectric properties of bacteria in porous media. This study will explore whether the formation of metal precipitates on cell surfaces can be detected using electrical geophysics methods that might ultimately be employed to monitor bioremediation of heavy metal contaminated soils at DOE sites. The Rutgers effort on this project is also being supported by additional funding direct from LNBL in support of it ‘Evolution of Pore Structure and Flowpath Challenge’ of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Science Focus Area (SFA). Chi Zhang (4th year PhD student) is performing some of the fundamental dielectric spectroscopy measurements in support of these studies. In a second project, Dimitrios Ntarlagiannis is collaborating with Treavor Kendall (Oregon Health and Science University) and Stephen Moysey (Clemson University) to improve the understanding of induced polarization (IP) signals associated with microbe-mineral interactions by comparing macroscale IP signals with microscale Polarization and Conductive Force Microscopy (PCFM) signals.
Petroleum Research Fund Awards:
Dimitrios Ntarlagiannis has received one new award (starting January 1, 2010) from the American Chemical Society (ACS), Petroleum Research Fund (PRF) Program for biogeophysical studies. This project is focused on the use of geo-electrical methods as a monitoring aid in Microbial Enhanced Oil recovery (MEOR) projects. With this project Dimitrios Ntarlagiannis aims to explore the benefits of using geophysical methods to monitor shallow MEOR processes and the possibility to improve current operations.