Friday, April 20, 2018
3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Gilmore Hall

Join in some fascinating tours where you can get up close and personal with sustainable science! These tours will have a maximum of 20 people each, so you'll get a chance to talk to the researchers and ask questions about their groundbreaking discoveries.

Is algae a better fertilizer or a biofuels feedstock? Watch researchers feed algae in the lab and convert agricultural waste into biofuels. Then, you'll head to the Gilmore annex and see researchers turn algae into bio-crude in a matter of minutes simulating natural processes that take millions of years to convert algae into petroleum. At Hong Liu's lab, you will see work on fuel cells that extract hydrogen power from bacteria that are digesting waste water. 

For event questions or accommodation requests, please contact Shelly Signs, (541) 737-0724 or shelly.signs@oregonstate.edu

Tours of this location were also available:
Wednesday, April 18, 2018     
11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.        

Ganti S. Murthy is a professor in Biological and Ecological Engineering Department at Oregon State University. His research is broadly focused on sustainable bioprocessing. For any proposed technology or policy, Murthy group seeks to answer the question: “Is this approach technically feasible, economically viable, resource sustainable and has lower environmental impacts compared to alternatives? If not, how can we make it so?” His group employs a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches using control theory, systems biology, process modeling, economic analysis and life cycle assessment (LCA) techniques to conduct molecular, cellular, industrial scale and systems level analyses of technologies to establish a sustainable bioeconomy. Recently, Murthy group started researching the nutrient-energy-water nexus at regional and global scale with a particular focus on building the resilience of agro-ecological systems to pulse and pressure disturbances.

Hong Liu is a Professor of Biological and Ecological Engineering (BEE) at Oregon State University (OSU). She is one of the world's leaders in the development of microbial electrochemical technologies for numerous applications in energy-sustainable wastewater treatment, energy and biofuels production, and pollutant remediation. She is recognized for her advances and development of several processes that are based on naturally-occurring bacteria that directly produce electrical current from organic matter in wastewater. She created a new method to produce hydrogen biofuels from the electrical current produced by bacteria. Currently, she is leading efforts to commercialize the technologies she and her team developed at OSU. She was named as a Highly Cited Researcher and listed, among about 3000 researchers worldwide, in The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014, 2015, 2016 by Thomson Reuters.