News & Fieldwork

Summer 2026

• July 2026: Ali Abdelkawi and Jaxen Lindsey's paper "A survival analysis framework for predicting gypsum scaling risk in dynamically concentrating desalination systems" was published in Water Research.
• July 2026: The food loss reduction team was awarded a Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources grant for "Advancing dehydration technologies for resilient Minnesota food systems." Congratulations team!
• June 2026: Natasha presented at the European Desalination Society conference in Marrakech, Morocco, on Ali Abdelkawi's work "Survival Analysis for the dynamic prediction of gypsum scaling risk in batch reverse osmosis systems."
• June 2026: Alumni Pauly Soulia was selected as a recipient of the Goldstein Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award. Congrats Pauly!
• June 2026: Jenn Hoody's paper "Assessing rockbed performance in Deep Winter Greenhouses under varying design parameters and operating conditions" was published in Applied Thermal Engineering.

Spring 2026

• May 2026: Carolyn Bernemann's paper "Opportunities and challenges in expanding access to peritoneal dialysis: A qualitative study in Latin America" published in Peritoneal Dialysis International. This study was conducted in collaboration with members of Saving Young Lives, a global initiative that helps hospitals in low-resource settings care for patients suffering from acute kidney injury.
• April 2026: The Wright Lab's startup Meld Bio won the grand prize in The Great Medtech Pitch Competition at the Design of Medical Devices Conference in Minneapolis. Congrats!
• February 2026: Ali Abdelkawi's poster "Minimizing Scaling in Modular Electrodialysis Crystallizers Using Crystallization Kinetics for Reliable Water Reuse" won the Best Student Poster Award at the AMTA-AWWA Membrane Technology Conference & Exhibition in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Congratulations Ali!
• February 2026: Natasha, Jenn, and Vasanth conducted fieldwork in Kenya, including data collection at the hybrid greenhouse solar dryer in Kitui and focus group interviews with farmers.
• February 2026: PhD student Juneau Paulsen has been awarded a Circularity Impact Program Fellowship as part of the NSF Research Traineeship Program. Congratulations Juneau!
  

Fall 2025

• December 2025: Vasanth Balamurugan traveled to Kitui, Kenya, to collect data during the experimental solar and biomass drying using the hybrid greenhouse solar dryer.
• November 2025: Pauly Soulia successfully defended his M.S. thesis titled "Temperature-Dependent Modeling of Electrodialysis for Brackish Groundwater Desalination" on November 25th. Congratulations Pauly!
• November 2025: Pauly and Ali presented at the Annual Conference on Desalination Science and Technology in Clearwater Beach, Florida.
• October 2025: Natasha gave the keynote presentation "From Water Access to Mango Drying: Engineering Innovations in the Attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals" at the JKUAT Sustainable Research and Innovation Conference.
• September 2025: Vasanth Balamurugan traveled to Kenya to install a sensor array to collect data on the performance of the hybrid greenhouse solar dryer in Kitui, Kenya, as part of the IonE Impact Goal Grant. He also attend the Nairobi stop of the Global Good Agricultural Practices (G.A.P) tour.
• September 2025: Graduate students Jenn Hoody and Carolyn Bernemann presented about the Wright Lab's approach to stakeholder engagement across all our research areas in the Co-Design with Community Partners workshop at the Design Justice Symposium in Minneapolis, MN.

Summer 2025

• August 2025: Ali Abdelkawi and Jaxen Lindsey's paper "Prediction of gypsum induction time to inform scaling kinetics using machine learning and Smoluchowski theory " has been published in the journal Desalination. Congrats all!
• August 2025: Graduate students Jenn Hoody, Ian Manning, and Carolyn Bernemann gave presentations at the International Design Engineering and Technical Conference in Anaheim, CA.
• August 2025: The brine management team was awarded a Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources grant for "Recovering Salts from Highly Saline Wastewater." Congrats!
• July 2025: Graduate student Ali Abdelkawi was awarded a 2025 National Water Research Institute/American Membrane Technology Association fellowship for his work on crystallization kinetics in small-scale brine management. Congratulations Ali!
• June 2025: Alumni Ian Song and Adithya Ganapathiraju's paper "Modeling the Impacts of Hydrogen Extraction on Anaerobic Fermentation Systems Using a Modified ADM1 Model" was published in ACS ES&T Engineering. The paper is part of the Wright Lab's collaboration with the Arnold and Novak labs in CEGE and the Guest lab at UIUC.
• June 2025: Graduate students Ali Abdelkawi, Ian Manning, and Pauly Soulia presented at the Universities Council on Water Resources Annual Conference for Water Resources in Minneapolis.
• June 2025: The Wright Lab was awarded a grant from Honeywell to investigate novel architectures for membrane-based humidity capture for PEM fuel cell systems. Congratulations Natasha and Ian!
• June 2025: The food loss reduction team was awarded a 2025 IonE Impact Goal Grant "From Kenya to Minnesota - Advancing Food Sovereignty Through Sustainable Value-Addition." Congrats Jenn, Vasanth, and Natasha!

Spring 2025

• April 2025: Natasha was awarded the 2025 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, a prestigious University of Minnesota award recognizing exceptional early-career faculty. Congrats!
• February 2025: Carolyn, Ibrahim, and Natasha attended the Nigerian Association of Nephrology scientific Conference, where Carolyn presented on the design and evaluation of our decentralized manufacturing system for peritoneal dialysis solutions.
• February 2025: Jenn Hoody conducted a field visit at a deep winter greenhouse in Lake City, MN, to collect validation data for her computational model.
• January 2025: Our lab's work to expand global access to dialysis treatment was awarded the KidneyX Sustainability Prize! This $1M award will serve to expand our team and fast-track our dialysis work moving forward. 
  

Fall 2024

• December 2024: Graduate students Ali Abdelkawi and Ian Manning presented their research at the International Desalination and Reuse Association World Congress in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
• October 2024: Ian Song successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "Development of a Mechanistic Model for Hydrogen Production through Decentralized Anaerobic Digestion of High-Strength Organic Wastewater" on October 15th. Congratulations Dr. Song!
• October 2024: Adithya Ganapathiraju successfully defended his M.S. thesis titled "Experimental Insights on the Effects of Hydrogen Extraction from the Fermentation Stage of a Two-Stage Anaerobic Digestion System" on October 11th. Congratulations Adi!
• October 2024: Adithya Ganapathiraju presented a poster "Effects of hydrogen extraction from fermentation reactor in a two-stage anaerobic digestion system" at the Minnesota Water Resources Conference in Minneapolis.
• October 2024: Pauly Soulia won the first place and people's choice awards at the Mechanical Engineering 3-Minute Thesis Competition and advanced to the CSE competition. Congrats Pauly!
• September 2024: Natasha was award the Nugent Family Faculty Teaching Award for her contributions to senior design and ME 5312 (solar thermal energy). Congratulations!

Summer 2024

• August 2024: Natasha, Ian Manning, and Carolyn Bernemann attended the International Design Engineering Technical Conference in Washington, D.C., where they presented about our postharvest food loss, brine management, and dialysis fluid production projects.
• August 2024: Ian Song presented a poster on our recent work on hydrogen production from a modular two-stage anaerobic digestion system at the IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition in Toronto, Canada.
• August 2024: Ian Song presented "Hydrogen Recovery in a Modular Encapsulated Two-Stage Anaerobic Digestion System" at the IWA Membrane Technology Conference in St. Louis, Missouri.
• June 2024: Alumni Mustafa Kaddoura's final paper associated with his PhD, "Novel data-driven optimal control methods for cost-effective brine treatment" has been published in Desalination. Congrats Dr. Kaddoura!

Spring 2024

• April 2024: Natasha and graduate student Carolyn Bernemann gave an invited talk "Expanding Global Access to Kidney Dialysis: Challenges and Opportunities in Latin American and Nigeria" at the Pediatric Devices section of the Design of Medical Devices Conference in Minneapolis.
• January 2024: Graduate student Carolyn Bernemann and Natasha traveled to Zimbabwe to meet with dialysis stakeholders for our dialysis fluid production project.
• January 2024: Natasha traveled to Kenya to meet with research partners for our project focused on reducing postharvest food loss for smallholder farmers.
• January 2024: Ian Song and Pauly Soulia's paper titled "Dissolved gas recovery from water using a sidestream hollow-fiber membrane module: First principles model synthesis and steady-state validation" has been published in the Journal of Membrane Science. This work is part of our lab's collaboration with the Arnold and Novak labs in CEGE. Congrats all!

Fall 2023

• October 2023: Graduate students Ian Song and Carolyn Bernemann participated in the Mechanical Engineering 3-Minute Thesis Competition. Carolyn won the first place and people's choice awards. She also advanced to the CSE competition, where she won the second place and people's choice awards. Congrats!

Summer 2023

• August 2023: Alumni Nallely Guillen Rodriguez presented "Modeling a Concentrated Solar Collector (CSC)-Convection-Enhanced Evaporation (CEE) System for Small-Scale Brine Management" at the International Design Engineering Technical Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. Natasha presented "Towards Quantifying Interviews: Comparing Techniques to Evaluate the Quality of Design Interviews" and "Design Interviews Conducted by Intra-and Intercultural Teams: A Case Study on Dialysis in Zimbabwe," which are part of a larger research study being done in collaboration with Prof. Carlye Lauff in the School of Product Design and MS student Micki Grover.
• July 2023: Graduate student Ian Song presented "First-Principles Analysis of Gas Extraction from Water using a Hollow Fiber Membrane Module" at the International Water Association Membrane Technology Conference in St. Louis, Missouri.
• June 2023: Trenton Brown successfully defended his M.S. thesis titled "Experimental Validation of Convection-Enhanced Brine Evaporation: Trials at Bench-Scale and Pilot-Scale" on June 13th. Congratulations Trenton!
• June 2023: Natasha gave the keynote presentation “Innovations in nation building and attainment of sustainable development goals: The roles of Academia and Industry” at the Faculty of Engineering and Technology International Conference at the University of Ilorin in Ilorin, Nigeria.
• May 2023: Graduate student Jenn Hoody and Natasha spent a week in Kenya exploring a new research area focused on cooling and dehydration technologies for food loss reduction.

Spring 2023

• May 2023: Mustafa Kaddoura's paper "Design comparative analysis of convection-enhanced evaporation systems" has been published in Applied Thermal Engineering.
• March 2023: PhD student Jenn Hoody has been awarded a Circularity Impact Program Fellowship as part of the NSF Research Traineeship Program, and PhD student Carolyn Bernemann has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Congratulations Jenn and Carolyn!
• March 2023: Ibrahim, Carolyn, and Natasha traveled to Nigeria to visit dialysis clinics and other in-country partners for our peritoneal dialysis fluid compounding project.
• February 2023: Nallely Guillen Rodriguez successfully defended her M.S. thesis titled "Modeling of a Solar Thermal Energy Input for an Optimized Convection-Enhanced Evaporation System" on February 9th. Congratulations Nallely!
• January 2023: Graduate student Ali Abdelkawi and Natasha traveled to India over winter break to visit field sites with brine management technologies and to work with our industrial partner QuadSun Solar.

Fall 2022

• November 2022: Ibrahim and Natasha attended the American Society of Nephrology annual conference and presented their poster titled "Using Design Ethnography to Identify Barriers to Dialysis Access in Lagos, Nigeria" with Dr. Michelle Rheault from the UMN Medical School Department of Pediatrics.
• October 2022: Mustafa Kaddoura successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled "Convection-Enhanced Evaporation: Modeling and Optimal Control for Modular Cost-Effective Brine Management," on October 20. Congratulations Dr. Kaddoura!
• October 2022: Natasha presented at the International Desalination Association World Congress in Sydney, Australia, on graduate student Mustafa Kaddoura's work titled "Modeling, optimization, and control of convection-enhanced evaporation for brine volume reduction."
• September 2022: Carolyn Bernemann presented a poster "Rapid, on-demand peritoneal dialysis fluid compounding for low resource settings" at the Institute for Engineering in Medicine Annual Conference in Minneapolis.

Summer 2022

• August 2022: To continue field testing for the brine management project, Trenton Brown and Ian Manning returned to the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in New Mexico.
• July 2022: Mustafa Kaddoura's paper "Optimization of convection-enhanced evaporation (CEE) using generalized cost ratios" has been published in Water Research. Congrats Mustafa!
• July 2022: Graduate students Trenton Brown and Ali Abdelkawi spent the week at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in New Mexico to begin field testing for the brine management project.
• July 2022: Natasha and graduate student Carolyn Bernemann traveled to Bogota, Colombia, to attend a peritoneal dialysis training session held by the International Society of Nephrology's Saving Young Lives initiatives, where they also explored dialysis treatment service models in the context of many Latin American countries
• June 2022: Graduate student Mustafa Kaddoura presented "Modeling and Optimal Control of Convection-Enhanced Evaporation (CEE) System for Cost-Effective Brine Volume Reduction" at the European Desalination Conference Desalination for the Environment: Clean Water and Energy in Gran Canaria, Spain.
• June 2022: Micki Grover and Jenn Hoody's work on "Developing design ethnography interviewing competencies for novices" was presented at the ASEE Annual Conference in Minneapolis. This work is a collaboration the between the Wright Lab and Dr. Carlye Lauff in Product Design.
• June 2022: Natasha presented Mustafa's work "Modular Convection-Enhanced Evaporation (CEE) System for Brine Management" at the UCOWR/NIWR Annual Water Resources Conferences in Greenville, South Carolina.

Spring 2022

• May 2022: Along with with co-PIs Paige Novak, Bill Arnold, Bonnie Keeler, and Timothy Smith, Natasha was awarded funding from NSF to establish a National Research Traineeship program with a focus on resource circularity.
• May 2022: Ben Szot successfully defended his M.S. thesis, titled "Using Low-cost Sensors to Verify a Fully Mixed Peritoneal Dialysis Solution for On-site Production in Low- and Middle-Income Countries," on May 24. Congratulations Ben!
• March 2022: The paper "Encapsulation technology for decentralized brewery wastewater treatment: A small pilot experiment" has been published in Bioresource Technology. This work is part of an ongoing collaboration with Prof. Bill Arnold and Prof. Paige Novak in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering at UMN and Prof. Jeremy Guest from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

2021

• November 2021: Graduate students Asma Ahmed and Matt Chosa traveled to Navajo Nation in Arizona to research brine management in conjunction with desalination for drinking water.
• August 2021: Graduate students Mustafa Kaddoura and Matt Chosa's paper "Mathematical modeling of a modular convection-enhanced evaporation system" has been published in Desalination. This work was in collaboration with our industrial partner QuadSun Solar. Congrats all!
• June 2021: Natasha's paper "Embedding Usage Sensors in Point-Of-Use Water Treatment Devices: Sensor Design and Application in Limpopo, South Africa," a collaboration with researchers from MIT and University of Virginia, has been published in Environmental Science & Technology.

2020

• December 2020: Wright Lab, along with our industrial partner QuadSun Solar, are excited to have been named as one of the quarterfinalists in the U.S. Department of Energy’s American-Made Solar Desalination Prize.
• October 2020: Natasha's paper "Chemical contamination of drinking water in resource-constrained settings: global prevalence and piloted mitigation strategies" was published in Annual Review of Environment and Resources.
• August 2020: Natasha's paper "Impact of low-cost point-of-use water treatment technologies on enteric infections and growth among children in Limpopo, South Africa" has been published in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. This work is a huge international collaboration with researchers from the University of Virginia, Emory University, University of Venda, Duquesne University, and University of Toronto.
• February 2020: Natasha gave two presentations "Re-Envisioning UMN Partnerships in the Global South" and "Global Learning and Research Opportunities for and with Displaced People" at the Internationalizing the Curriculum and Campus Conference at the University of Minnesota.
• January 2020: Graduate students Matt Chosa and Mustafa Kaddoura traveled to India with Natasha to collaborate with our industrial partner QuadSun Solar.
• January 2020: Graduate student Ben Szot, research scientist Ibrahim Yekinni, and Prof. Wright traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, to further explore the context of kidney dialysis in Nigeria, building on findings from Ibrahim and Jackie's previous trip.

2019

• November 2019: Undergraduate researcher Jackie Warehime and research scientist Ibrahim Yekinni traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, to begin research into the context of dialysis treatment and service models in Nigeria.