Jun Kim
M.S.E. Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea, 2007
I am a Graduate Researcher of Civil and Environmental Engineering at William Marsh Rice University and a member of the NSF funded Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) Center. My research interests are in water treatment and analysis technologies, including nano-material driven purification process, advanced membrane applications, seawater desalination and pre-treatment system development, water quality analysis, and oil/gas produced water treatment. For my PhD research, I focus on selective removal of toxic metal ions using the membrane capacitive deionization (MCDI) method.
Xiaochuan Huang
M.S. Tsinghua University, China, 2017
I am a PhD student in Dr. Qilin Li’s lab, specializing in advanced water treatment technologies. My primary research interest is membrane processes in water and wastewater treatment. Currently, I study the impact of material surface properties on scaling and fouling in membrane distillation systems, with a focus on seawater and brackish water desalination systems. I am from China and I obtained my M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, studying the anti-biofouling properties of nanomaterial modified membrane surfaces. Exploring the unknown is exciting. I am delighted to be a member of Dr. Li’ lab and the NSF funded Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) to pursue my research in advanced water treatment technologies.
Ruikun Xin
M.S. Carnegie Mellon University, 2017
I am from Beijing, China. I did my undergraduate in Environmental Sciences at the University of Iowa where I learned the importance of wastewater treatment. I recently finished my M.S. study in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where I investigated heat transfer in direct contact membrane distillation systems. Currently, at Rice University my research goals are to develop a nanocomposite membrane for dual energy source membrane distillation (DESMD) to efficiently recover freshwater from reverse osmosis (RO) or nanofiltration (NF) concentrate, and design a novel membrane module for DESMD processes. The nanocomposite membrane will allow solarthermal and electric resistive heating directly at the membrane surface, which reverses temperature polarization and enhances energy efficiency of MD process.