Research

Project Tool Status | Films/Filtration | Struvite | Field Trials/Crop Fertility | Economics | Outreach

Project Tool Status

			Greg Thoma, Ph.D. Director for Agricultural Modeling and Lifecycle Assessment for the AgNext Program Colorado State University Email Dr. Greg Thoma
Greg Thoma, Ph.D. is the Director for Agricultural Modeling and Lifecycle Assessment for the AgNext program at Colorado State University. He is leading efforts at stakeholder engaged, experimentally verified, model development for sustainable animal agriculture systems. He recently retired after a 28-year career in Chemical Engineering at the University of Arkansas where he served as inaugural Director for Research of The Sustainability Consortium and Director for Research for the University of Arkansas Resiliency Center. He has worked in sustainable food systems since 2008 and has led numerous food and agriculture life cycle assessment projects: milk, cheese, milk delivery systems, yogurt, swine, poultry, corn, fruits and vegetables, pulses, and beef. He is the North American subject editor for Agriculture for the International Journal of Lifecycle Assessment and has served on the scientific/technical/organizational committee for numerous international LCA conferences. He has been active with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership since its inception serving as the Technical Advisory Group Lead/Co-lead for development of the poultry, swine, and large ruminants’ guidelines.
			Sudharsan Varma Vempalli, Ph.D. Research Associate University of Arkansas Email
Dr. Vempalli is an Environmental Engineer with a research focus on manure management and modeling GHG emissions. After graduating from IIT Guwahati, India he joined Agricultural Research Organization, in Israel as Post Doc and worked on “Process control, GHG-Odor emissions, sanitary and agronomics aspects” during composting of livestock manure and industrial sludge. Currently, he works with Dr. Greg Thoma’s research group at the University of Arkansas on “Developing decision support tool for dairy and swine manure management”. He focuses on integrating manure management and a decision support system that helps users to identify the suite of technologies that could be used, given the farm’s unique set of preferences and constraints.
			Erin Scott Graduate Research Assistant University of Arkansas Email
Erin Scott is a graduate research assistant in the Public Policy PhD program at the University of Arkansas. Erin is working on the economics of manure management systems, analyzing costs and benefits of implementing technologies on-farm to better manage manure water and nutrients. These economic analyses are integrated into the Decision Support Tool to help farmers, consultants, and others understand the economic impacts of their manure management decisions.

Films/Filtration

			Julie Renner, Ph.D. Associate Professor Case Western Reserve University Email
Dr. Julie N. Renner is a Climo Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University. Her group has multiple projects developing biomolecular platforms to control solid-liquid interfaces including projects in nutrient recycling technology. Specifically, Dr. Renner’s group is developing platforms to rapidly screen promising peptide sequences, understand the fundamentals behind their behavior, and implement them in a scalable way.
			Bernadette Schneider, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Scholar Case Western Reserve University Email
Dr. Bernadette Schneider is a postdoctoral scholar in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, working with Prof. Julie Renner and Prof. Christine Duval. She is applying her training as an inorganic chemist to her research at Case on the development of peptide-modified membranes for water treatment applications. These materials will be used to investigate the role of peptides in biosorption, a process using biologically-derived materials to remove specific contaminants from water, while the use of membranes will be used to interrogate the scalability of the adsorption process. The immobilized peptides will bind a metal ion (e.g., a lanthanide), that has a high affinity for phosphate anions that may be found in agricultural waste streams.

Struvite

			Lauren Greenlee, Ph.D. Associate Professor Pennsylvania State University Email Phone: 610-507-6390
Lauren Greenlee served as the original PI on this project through her time as an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas and subsequently as an Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University.  She is currently Chief Technology Officer at the green hydrogen startup, sHYp, and continues to collaborate with the project team on electrochemical engineering activities. Dr. Greenlee has a technical background in water treatment processes and electrochemical engineering, with interests in energy, water, and agricultural sustainability.
			Arash Emdadi Ph.D. Cadidate Pennsylvania State University Email
As a Ph.D. student in the project, Arash investigates nitrate reduction by peptide-coated gold electrocatalyst. He is analyzing the nitrate reduction using negatively charged, positively charged, and hydrophobic peptides coated on the surface of gold electrodes. In addition to electrochemical evaluation, his research includes the stability analysis of peptide-coated gold electrocatalysts and product assessment.
			Ivy Wu Ph.D. Student Colorado School of Mines Email
Ivy works as part of the Herring lab on developing new polymer membrane materials for electrified nutrient recovery. Specifically, she has developed a triblock copolymer anion exchange membrane with high tunability for different applications such as electrodialysis. Additionally, she has worked on enabling electrochemical struvite precipitation at non-alkaline pH coupled with hydrogen production. Her work will increase the type of wastewater that can be used for electrochemical nutrient recovery and increase understanding of this multi-faceted technology.

Field Trials/Crop Fertility

			Kristofor R. Brye, Ph.D. University Professor of Applied Soil Physics and Pedology University of Arkansas Email Phone: (479) 575-5742
Dr. Brye serves as the agronomist on this project, where he is directing and supervising the agronomic and environmental evaluations of the laboratory-created electrochemically precipitate struvite material compared to several other commonly used, commercially available fertilizer-phosphorus sources. Research activities being conducted by several graduate students include laboratory-based, column leaching experiments, plant-less soil incubations, rainfall-runoff simulation experiments; greenhouse-based crop response studies with corn, soybean, rice, and wheat; greenhouse-based studies evaluating greenhouse gas emissions and plant response from rice grown under flood-irrigated and simulated furrow-irrigated conditions; and field-based studies evaluating greenhouse gas emissions and plant response furrow-irrigated rice production.
			Chandler Arel Master’s Student University of Arkansas Email Phone: (501) 259-3944
Chandler Arel serves as a master’s student at the University of Arkansas under Dr. Kristofor Brye while pursuing his degree in Crop, Soil, and Environmental Sciences. Chandler’s role in the MaNuRe project is to study the use of “real” wastewater derived struvite in comparison to struvite derived from the lab and other commercially available phosphorus fertilizers. This research evaluates the effects of different fertilizer-P sources on plant response and greenhouse gas fluxes and emissions in simulated flood-, and furrow-irrigated rice under greenhouse conditions.
			Diego Della Lunga Ph.D. Student in the Environmental Dynamics Department University of Arkansas Email Phone: (479) 422-7173
Diego works on the environmental portion on this project, where he is actively researching the effect of the laboratory-created electrochemically precipitate struvite material on greenhouse gas emissions in flooded and furrow-irrigated conditions, while completing his Ph.D. under the advising of Dr. K. Brye. Research activities being conducted include greenhouse and field studies to evaluate the effect of different phosphorous fertilizers, including electrochemically precipitate struvite, diammonium phosphate, triple superphosphate, and chemically precipitate struvite on greenhouse gas fluxes, emissions (i.e., CO2, CH4, N2O) and plant response in rice production systems under flooded and furrow-irrigated conditions.
			Tatum Simms Ph.D. Candidate University of Arkansas Email Phone: (870) 540-9907
On this project, Tatum Simms serves on the agronomic field trials team, as a research assistant, evaluating the environmental effects particularly, the leaching-potential and soil profile distribution of the synthetically prepared electrochemically precipitated struvite (ECST), compared to other commonly available fertilizer-phosphorus sources. Tatum also investigates the fertilizer response of ECST in corn, wheat, and soybean compared to that of commercially available phosphorus fertilizers in soils from Arkansas, Missouri, and Nebraska under greenhouse conditions. Additionally, Tatum evaluates the solubility and soil dynamics of ECST in comparison to conventional phosphorus fertilizers in various soil textures via a plant-less moist-soil incubation experiment.

Economics

			Jennie Popp, Ph.D. Professor of Agricultural Economics and Associate Dean University of Arkansas Email
Jennie is helping to oversee in the Decision Support Tool the development of the algorithms that will be used to calculate economic costs (both capital expenditures and operational) and benefits (in terms of revenues or cost savings) associated with the adoption of different manure management systems (MMS) given different user preferences related to the importance of economic, environmental and operational considerations related to the MMS.
			Erin Scott Graduate Research Assistant University of Arkansas Email
Erin Scott is a graduate research assistant in the Public Policy PhD program at the University of Arkansas. Erin is working on the economics of manure management systems, analyzing costs and benefits of implementing technologies on-farm to better manage manure water and nutrients. These economic analyses are integrated into the Decision Support Tool to help farmers, consultants, and others understand the economic impacts of their manure management decisions.

Outreach

			Teng-Teeh Lim, Ph.D. Extension Professor University of Missouri Email
Dr. Teng Lim in an extension professor at University of Missouri and a professional engineer. He developed a web-based, interactive odor setback guideline, and was part of the National Air Emission Monitoring Study. His research and extension programs focus on developing and assessing practical animal manure management and air quality control. Dr. Lim is an active member of the University of Missouri Dairy and Swine Focus Teams. He also enjoys collaborating to improve on-farm biosecurity projects and how manure applications affect soil health. Teng is leading the team at University of Missouri to collaborate with four other universities, to create a decision-support tool for selection of liquid manure treatment technology. The technical innovation is to apply robust and practical engineering technology to enable manure treatment and water/nutrient recycling. We have been engaging stakeholders in the agricultural community and the water treatment technology industry to document how the various technologies work, and the opportunities and challenges in the agricultural sector. We have been producing extension publications of various liquid manure management technologies, which include dissolved air floatation, pull-plug sediment basin, lagoon desludging process, and large-scale pig manure composting.
			Richard Stowell, Ph.D., P.E. Professor & Extension Specialist in Animal Environment University of Nebraska-Lincoln Email Phone: (402) 471-3912
Rick Stowell leads the University of Nebraska efforts within the MaNuRe project’s extension and outreach team. This team interfaces regularly with the Decision-Support Tool development team to ensure that the tool is based upon real-world information and has optimal practical utility for prospective users. He also serve a liaison role with the Livestock & Poultry Environmental Learning Community, in which he looks to keep this national team of extension professionals informed about and engaged in the project. Rick oversee development of the project’s web presence and co-coordinate project-related extension events