Columbia faculty saving the world, one drop of water at a time.

Columbia faculty do all types of great things for the world. Editor in Chief Britt Fossum interviewed one of them, Kartik Chandran, who recently earned a MacArthur Fellowship for his work on transforming wastewater. 

The office of the Chandran research group is located at the very end of a quiet Mudd hallway. In fact, I’m not even sure that the office is occupied until I tried opening the door and inadvertently walk in on a conversation between a few research students who directed me to Professor Chandran’s already open door.

He had just gotten back from class: Chandran teaches Environmental Engineering and Environmental Microbiology in the Engineering school. It was during one of these classes that he was first called with the news. Upon returning to his office, the only sign that he was the latest recipient of one of the most prestigious awards were a few missed calls on his cell phone from an unrecognized number. It was not until a third call came through on his office phone that he received the news.

Chandran says that the award was completely unexpected. He “still doesn’t know who nominated me,” he tells me.

Kartik Chandran has been at Columbia for nearly ten years, following B.S. studies at the Indian Institute of Technology at Roorkee and a PHd at the University of Connecticut. He spent a brief stint working in industry for a private engineering firm before returning to academia. Since coming here, he has worked to apply a systems-based approach to studying the nitrogen cycle. Chandran describes this process of reengineering the nitrogen cycle as the traditional focus of his work—”looking at different microbial pathways, different metabolic pathways, associated with the global nitrogen cycle.” Once these pathways are better understood they can become powerful tools for projects like providing clean water. In 2009, Chandran began working with the student group Engineers Without Borders to improve wastewater treatment in Ghana by utilizing wastewater for fertilizing agriculture. Highlighting his team, he adds that a number of students in his research group were also involved with the project. While his direct involvement has tapered off as the project came to an end, he continues to keep in touch through fundraising with the NY Water Summit and applications for EPA funding.

Increasingly, Chandran’s research has shifted towards the relationship between the nitrogen and water cycles, explaining them as inextricably linked processes thrown off-balance by human intervention. A third process, the carbon cycle, must also be incorporated into the picture. An investigation of the greenhouse gas footprint from nitrogenous greenhouse gases opened the door to study on the link between the nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle.

While these links provide insight into just how human intervention effects the cycling of nutrients, Chandran has even higher hopes for the future. Many of the nitrogen fixing organisms he has studied are also able to fix carbon, they can be used for “the recovery of nutrients rather than just removal of nitrogen, recovery of nitrogen but also tying that to carbon recovery because some of the organisms that cycle nitrogen can also cycle carbon.” Rather than using the energy wasting process of converting reactive nitrogen back to N2 gas, the nitrogen can instead be recovered and used. Carbon recovery linked to nitrogen recovery can even help monetize this process by making fuels. He enthusiastically described this as a kind of “organic refinery,” with all the possible endpoints of organic molecules being available.

Receiving the MacArthur fellowship has led Chandran to hope that he can continue exploring in more depth the issue of resource recovery, rather than focusing on single issues like wastewater treatment. I asked him whether he felt that the award was some kind of validation for his work or his group’s work, to which he responds that it was good for the field. In the past, not many environmental engineers have won this fellowship. When they have, it was for projects that are already fairly high profile like improving air quality or providing drinking water. But clean water from wastewater treatment and sanitation is just as important a goal for sustainable development. Chandran adds that his main hope for the fellowship is ”to elevate these fields to the popular imagination, to regular conversations beyond scientific discussions. Almost like what Al Gore did with ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, raising the awareness.”

He adds that while he’s excited, there is always pressure, especially as he feels that the field will be placed increasingly under public scrutiny over time. This systems-based approach might be the only way to go about solving the many environmental problems facing the world today. Chandran describes the system as he sees it by saying that the two areas that humans have caused the most damage are in biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle. In the case of the nitrogen cycle, this damage is related to and has a causal effect on almost every other problem in sustainable development today, from the ever-increasing biomass to the depletion of rare elements. He states that in order to grow plants for food and fuel, “we need nitrogen and phosphorus. Phosphorus we have to mine, but we will run out of phosphorus before we run out of fuel. We are continuously making reactive nitrogen via the Haber-Bosch process so we are also continuously enriching the planet with reactive nitrogen.”

Humans have completely thrown off the natural nitrogen and carbon cycle by constantly increasing the biomass of carbon and the availability of reactive nitrogen: “it’s way off balance, you can’t even use the world balance.” Chandran hopes that by adapting the ways we capture nitrogen and recycle it, human actions can stop adding to the imbalance we have created and possibly even reverse the damage. In other words, in an office at the very end of a quiet Mudd hallway, one of your professors is working to put the world back into place and maybe even leave it a little better than we found it.

Treating water for days via Shuttershock