An initiative of the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design (TISED), SEDTalks! is an educational and skill-building series for graduate students in the Faculty of Engineering whose research advances sustainability in the areas of engineering and design. The SEDTalks! event features TEDTalk-style presentations from three graduate students, our ChangeMakers, followed by a live Q&A and a networking cocktail reception.
Sponsored by 
| Meet our 2023 ChangeMakers: | ||
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Hamidreza Ermagan |
Fathima Afsal |
Arav Saherwala |
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Mining and Materials Engineering, Ph.D. Candidate SUPV: Prof. Agus Sasmito Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency |
Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Ph.D. Candidate SUPV: Prof.Dominic Frigon Sustainable Industrial Processes & Manufacturing |
Chemical Engineering, Master's student SUPV: Prof. Nathalie Tufenkji Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience |
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Rethinking energy storage: following in our ancestors’ footsteps to create a sustainable energy future. |
How can we engineer our way out of creating more super-bugs? |
Shining a Light on the Unseen: Spectral Fingerprinting Nanoplastics to Investigate their Environmental Impact |
| While renewables offer a clean source of power, the batteries necessary to make them available 24/7 come at a high environmental cost. Hamidreza's research looks to the past when thick walls of stones were used to trap the sun's heat during the day and release it slowly and evenly at night. With this passive technique as inspiration, his work focuses on meeting modern energy needs, which necessitates concentrated high-temperature storage. Maximizing the efficiency and safety of high-temperature systems requires understanding the heat transfer characteristics that current computational fluid dynamics models cannot accurately model. Hamidreza's research is to develop new correlations to improve the accuracy of these models, allowing this ancient technology to be an integral part of a green future. |
Sustainability is not just about the health of our planet, but also the health of all living animals on our planet. Currently the proliferation of antibiotic resistant super-bugs threatens that health. Antibiotic resistance is often thought of as a problem stemming from farms, municipal wastewaters and hospitals. Recent research has indicated that each of us may also be a prospective incubator by potentially hosting millions of antibiotic resistant genes in non-pathogenic microbes. These microbes have the ability to transfer that antibiotic resistance to a pathogen, making each person a possible source of the next antibiotic resistant super-bug. Fathima’s research focuses on developing methods to study these complex pathways with hopes to uncover a mechanism that may short-circuit this process before it starts. |
Researchers have shown that large plastics accumulating in the environment break down into smaller microplastics or nanoplastics through exposure factors such as UV light, abrasion, or temperature variation. The plastic fragments are then taken up by smaller aquatic organisms and bioaccumulate up through the food chain, leading to potential impacts on human health. Due to their small size, detecting and identifying micro- and nano-plastics in aquatic environments is challenging. Avar’s research focuses on studying the spectral information from nanoplastics using enhanced darkfield hyperspectral microscopy. This novel process will help develop detection methods for nanoplastics that will help us understand nanoplastics’ fate, transport, and impact on the environment with hopes of informing future policy decisions regarding plastic pollution monitoring. |
We are proud to announce that our event has been awarded Silver Sustainable Event certification by the McGill Sustainable Events program run by the McGill Office of Sustainability.
Nous sommes fiers d’annoncer que notre événement a été certifié comme événement D’Argent par le programme Événements durables McGill du Bureau du développement durable de l’Université McGill.