Turning waste into fuel with USRA
Third-year Mechanical Engineering student Abigail Stokes never thought she’d find herself working with waste treatment sludge as she had aspired to work in the automotive or biomedical industry. Instead, as she starts her second-semester of third year, Stokes well-ensconced in waste treatment sludge as an undergraduate researcher at UBC Okanagan’s Bioreactor Technology Group (BTG). “A couple of years ago, I started working in the waste treatment industry, and by far it is the most exciting research experience I’d had,” says Stokes, who recently completed a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) term at the BTG. “Waste is something that everyone has to deal with, and will become a bigger and bigger issue as we let it go.”