JUNE 2005 NEWS

A very warm welcome to Professor Susan Grimes

A very warm welcome to Professor Susan Grimes who joins the academic staff of the EWRE section, with effect from the 1st June. Professor Grimes has been appointed to the new SITA/Royal Academy of Engineering Professorship in Waste Management, which is the College's first Chair of Waste Management. Professor Grimes will provide complementarity and leadership to the research of the EWRE section and intends to develop technologies for reusing and recycling anything from household rubbish to large tonnage waste from the construction industry. She hopes her research will put an end to the culture that lumps all waste together, from food to computer components and carpets, allowing potentially valuable resources to go un-recovered.

She received her first degree in Chemistry from the Universit y of London, and a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from The City University, London. She took up a Research Fellowship at The City University in 1982 and was awarded an MBA from the same institution in 1988.

In 1990, Professor Grimes took up a Lectureship at Brunel University, where she went on to set up the Centre for Environmental Research in 1997. She has been Director of the Centre since its inception and during her time there she has supervised more than 70 research students. In 2000, Professor Grimes led a team from her Brunel research group, and the Thames region of the Environment agency, to win the Institute of Wastes Management Millennium Prize for a study on London's biodegradable waste. She became a Professor in 2002.

She has acted as a consultant on issues such as material re covery from waste, recycling metals as added value chemicals and environmental legislative compliance, to a range of organisations including the waste, food, metal recovery, electronics and textile industries.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management. She has published over 100 research papers.

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Yorkshire Water has recently announced that from the 1st April 2005 Imperial College London is one of four institutions to enter into a ground-breaking partnership with th e company in the vital field of water sector research and development. In a five year strategy worth several million pounds, the four universities will work closely together to provide part of  Yorkshire Water Research and Development Programme , the first time this arrangement has been used in such part nership within the water sector. Professor Nigel Graham  is the principle investigator at Imperial.

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Research Seminar on “Ferrate [Iron(VI)] – Environmentally-Friendly Oxidant,Coagulant and Disinfectant”  by Professor Virender Sharma, Ferrate Technologies USA
Tuesday 7t h June 2005, Room 208, Skempton Building, Civil & Environme nt al E ngineering, 15.30 – 17.00 All welcome.