Congratulations to Lilia Ochoa Romero, a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, for winning the Mark B. Bain Doctoral Fellowship, sponsored by the Hudson River Foundation. The Foundation grants this competitive fellowship to six doctoral students a year who are conducting research on the Hudson River system. Lilia’s research, under the direction of Professor Nicole Fahrenfeld, will focus on modeling the transport time and particle tracking of microplastics to better comprehend the fragmentation and the resulting distribution of plastic particles throughout the Hudson River and estuary.
Lilia has also mentored several undergraduates in Dr. Fahrenfeld’s laboratory, including RISE at Rutgers summer student, Jenny Cruz, who participated in the sampling and extraction of microplastics in stormwater. Jenny attends Kean College during the academic year. Thanks to their valuable collaboration, it has been possible to obtain robust data, such as chemical composition, morphology, and size of microplastics to conduct her research. See Jenny’s Symposium poster describing this impactful work here.