Thursday, 21 July 10:00am –11:00am

This seminar will be delivered in Chemistry Lecture Theatre 3 and Online Zoom Please email chemistry.researchsupport@sydney.edu.au for zoom link and password.

Speaker: Dr Amy Pickering; University of California, Berkeley

Host: The Sydney University Chemical Society (SUCS)

Title: Expanding access to safely managed drinking water through decentralized passive chlorination

Abstract: Worldwide, over 2.1 billion people (~27% global population) lack access to safely managed drinking water services. Centralized drinking water treatment systems (e.g., membrane filtration, ozonation, chlorination) are cost-prohibitive, energy intensive, and incompatible with the water infrastructure in many low-income communities. Household-level water treatment approaches (e.g., boiling, solar disinfection, biosand/ceramic filters, tablet chlorine dosers) are time-consuming and typically require substantial behavior change. There is a need for effective water treatment technologies that provide a higher level of service and can be deployed widely through sustainable and scalable financial and business models. This talk will focus on passive chlorination as a strategy for scaling up water disinfection in low-income settings, including our process for human-centered technology design of a novel chlorine doser, health impact evaluation, and the development of financially sustainable implementation models.

Biography: Amy J. Pickering, Ph.D. is the Blum Center Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice, jointly appointed in Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Pickering’s lab designs and evaluates novel water and sanitation technologies and interventions to reduce infectious disease, with a focus on products that minimize the user burden for adoption. Dr. Pickering received her B.S. from Cornell University, M.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, and Ph.D. from Stanford University. She has also held positions as a senior fellow and research engineer at Stanford University, an environmental engineer at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Fulbright Fellow in Malaysia. She is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator and winner of the NSF early CAREER Award.