Dr. Amy Mueller – Principle Investigator
Dr. Mueller is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Marine & Environmental Sciences. Work in the Environmental Sensors Lab builds on Dr. Mueller’s prior research at MIT’s Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering and the University of Washington’s Department of Oceanography.
Wenjin Zhang – Ph.D. Candidate (Interdisciplinary Engineering)
Wenjin joined the group after completing her MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Wenjin’s research focuses on informatics for decision and control of civil and environmental infrastructure systems, including machine learning applied to wastewater treatment sensing and process control.
Alfred Navato – Ph.D. Candidate (Computer Engineering)
Alfred came to Northeastern from almost 8 years working in industry to tackle issues at the intersection of data methods and civil and environmental engineering, particularly focused on water resources.
Ben Eck – Ph.D. Candidate (Civil and Environmental Engineering – Data and Systems)
After working for several years implementing environmental sensing technologies in industry, Ben joined the lab in 2020 to develop novel chemical sensor arrays that could enable truly low-cost water quality sensing. Outside the lab, Ben spends most of his time staring at maps planning bike and ski adventures.
Sadia Khan – Ph.D. Candidate (Civil and Environmental Engineering – Water, Environmental, and Coastal Systems)
Sadia Khan is working on characterizing stormwater nutrient export variability to develop an optimized diversion and treatment strategy. As a part of the collaborative study between the City of Cambridge, Stantec, and Northeastern University, Sadia is focusing on data-driven solutions for managing stormwater nutrient export from a dense urban watershed. Currently Sadia is working on high resolution multi parameter stormwater monitoring with Boston Water and Sewer Commission and Kleinfelder. She likes to cook, paint, and travel.
Alex Cabral – Ph.D. Candidate (Computer Science, Harvard University)
Alex joined the lab in 2020 with a passion for building bridges between computer science and stakeholder needs. Her graduate research focuses on air quality monitoring and enabling use of multiple types of affordable air quality sensors for use by municipalities to better understand air quality issues, particularly in Environmental Justice communities.
Alex Renaud – Class of 2023, Environmental Engineering and Landscape Architecture
Alex joined the lab in early 2021 to pursue undergraduate research conducting data management and lab work of weekly sampling and analysis of 15 analytes for the Boston Water and Sewer Commission. He explored workflows for quality assurance and control of sample data and processed files to be uploaded to a stormwater database.
Lauren MacDonald – Class of 2022, Environmental Geology and Chemistry
Lauren joined the lab in 2020 to get experience with field and lab work for environmental applications. She has contributed to stormwater monitoring efforts through weekly field sampling, weekly lab analysis for nutrients, and through assisting with QAC and compliance processes development and implementation.
Jaclyn Helliwell – Class of 2023, Environmental Engineering
Jackie joined the lab in 2021 to conduct field work, lab analyses, and data analysis related to stormwater studies for the Boston Water and Sewer Commission. She assisted with weekly and wet weather sampling, completed analyses for biological and chemical parameters, and assisted with overall project management and data management.
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Previous Lab Members
POSTDOCS and RESEARCH STAFF
Andrew Snauffer – Postdoc (2018-2019)
Drew was instrumental in pushing forward exploration of application of novel sensor + machine learning approaches for measuring constituents of wastewater in wastewater treatment reactors, with the goal of supporting innovation in online controls in environmental infrastructure.
Gilly Moore – Research Technician (2020-2021)
Gilly joined the group after graduating from Middlebury College with her BA in Chemistry in 2020 with a passion for environmental chemistry. She is leading an effort to analyze 15 analytes in Boston stormwater weekly for a whole year to inform the Boston Water and Sewer Commission about conditions – and variability in conditions – at multiple stormwater monitoring sites.
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Chi Zhang – M.S. in Computer Science (2020)
Chi joined the lab in 2020 to work on a collaborative project with the Ocean Genome Legacy Center and Prof. Dan Distel, applying computer science tools such as UI development and AI/ML approaches to analysis of DNA samples from a wide variety of fish species.
Sucharita Sridharan- M.S. in Environmental Engineering (2021)
Sucharita completed an MS Report in the lab, contributing to analysis of samples from a novel wastewater treatment process, with a focus on Ca++ and Mg++ analysis via Flame AA.
Puranjay Patil – M.S. in Environmental Engineering (2021)
Puranjay completed an MS Report in the lab, contributing to analysis of samples from a novel wastewater treatment process, with a focus on K+ and Na+ analysis via Flame AA.
Srushti Shah – M.S. in Environmental Engineering (2020)
Srushti joined the team in winter 2018 to assist in detection of a range of ions in wastewater. She is fundamentally concentrating on exploring waste water treatment process research.
Umang Chauhan – M.S. in Environmental Engineering (2019)
Umang joined Northeastern after earning a B.S. from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. His graduate work, as well as an 8-month full time Co-op project in the lab, characterized novel wastewater processes, specifically focused on N and P species as well as other major cations.
Yuchen Liu – M.S. in Environmental Engineering (2019)
Yuchen completed an MS Report in the lab development analysis methods for phosphorous using FAA, with the goal of feasibility analysis of this approach for environmental applications.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Shannon Butler – Class of 2023, Environmental Engineering
Shannon is pursuing undergraduate research in the lab focusing on field and lab work for environmental applications, specifically assisting with stormwater monitoring efforts.
Audrey Berlin – Class of 2021, Environmental Science
Audrey Berlin’s major has a Concentration in Geoscience and a minor in Computer Science. Her research in the lab leveraged her love for coding to develop a database system for storing, querying, and archiving stormwater data. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, biking, cooking, and photography.
Alina Dess – Class of 2021, Environmental Engineering
Alina joined the lab in the summer of 2019 to assist with stormwater sampling project in Cambridge, MA, specifically looking at the concentrations of phosphorous and nitrogen. During the COVID pandemic, Alina helped with a mask filtration efficiency project conducted jointly with Professor Loretta Fernandez’s lab.
Fizzah Shaikh – Class of 2021, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Fizzah dove into research at Northeastern in her very first year on campus and worked on everything from embedded controller design to drinking water quality monitoring (in collaboration with Prof. Ameet Pinto’s lab) to thinking about hardware for real-time decision making and adaptive sampling.
Meyling Yi – Class of 2021, Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics
Mey joined the lab in Fall of 2018 to assist in the development of electrical and mechanical components for an automated ion-detecting in-situ sampler which will be used to monitor phosphorous concentrations of storm water in real-time. Since then she has contributed with mechanical design on other novel monitoring systems, including for long-term study of wastewaters.
Edgar Castro – Class of 2020, Environmental Engineering
Edgar joined the lab in 2018 to carry out a pilot study assessing the extent of environmental stressors in public transit (things like noise, particulate matter, and vibration). Edgar has also worked on creating tools through which feed-forward neural networks trained in MATLAB can be run in LabVIEW.
Anna Cullen – Class of 2020, Chemistry
Anna joined the lab in Fall 2016 to study issues related to farming productivity in developing countries. Specifically Anna worked on a fast, cheap, point-of-sale test for fertilizer quality to protect career farmers from the economically-devastating consequences of purchasing low-quality fertilizers.
Alex Agudelo – Class of 2018, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Alex joined the team during his Junior year at Northeastern to lead development of an embedded controller for the trace-metal in-situ sampler which will be used to study nutrients (like Fe) at long-term ocean monitoring stations; this project integrates sensing, algorithm development, and controls.
Josh Toby – Class of 2021, Computer Engineering
During his sophomore year Josh tackled implementation of the embedded controller for a portable miniaturized microscope for on-site drinking water monitoring, including hardware control (lighting, sample slide movement) and data management (image collection, saving, and interfacing with automated microbial count algorithms).
Jahaan Saini – Class of 2021, Industrial Engineering
During her sophomore year Jahaan explored questions around the mechanics of low-cost underwater releases, studying heat transfer and power consumption in a variety of melting and breaking architectures for trace metal clean water sampling.