PhD student Natasha Wright makes water safe to drink for
rural, off-grid Indian villages.
(June 22, 2015) When
graduate student Natasha Wright began her PhD program in mechanical
engineering, she had no idea how to remove salt from groundwater to make it
more palatable, nor had she ever been to India, where this is an ongoing need.
Now, three years and six trips to India later, this is the
sole focus of her work.
Wright joined the lab of Amos Winter, an assistant professor
of mechanical engineering, in 2012. The lab was just getting established, and
the aim of Wright’s project was vague at first: Work on water treatment in
India, with a possible focus on filtering biological contaminants from
groundwater to make it safe to drink.
There are already a number of filters on the market that can
do this, and during her second trip to India, Wright interviewed a number of
villagers, finding that many of them weren’t using these filters. She became
skeptical of how useful it would be to develop yet another device like this.