Congratulations to Ke He from the Blaney Lab for winning the Best Poster Award in the “Analytical Methods for Detecting and Prioritizing Contaminants of Concern” symposium at the fall 2014 American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, CA. His poster was titled, Determination of fluoroquinolone antibiotics in wastewater by solid-phase extraction high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection.

Congratulations to Zachary Hopkins (Blaney Lab) on the successful defense of his MS thesis, Transformation of UV-filters by ozone: Reaction kinetics and removal of UV absorbance. This fall, Zack will start a PhD program in Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University.

Lee Blaney, in partnership with Triea Systems, LLC, received a $250,000 research award from the Maryland Industrial Partnerships program and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. With this award, Blaney’s team will optimize the recovery of phosphorus from animal manure produced in Maryland. The collaboration with Triea Systems will lead to development of a pilot-scale system to be used on Maryland farms. A press-release on the award is available at the following link: http://www.trieasystems.com/blog/triea-systems-and-umbc-receive-250k-grant-from-maryland-department-of-natural-resources-and-maryland-industrial-partnerships