Arezoo Khodayari, associate professor in ECST’s Department of Civil Engineering, and her project team have been awarded a $570,000 grant from NASA to inspire students to participate in NASA research and pursue STEM degrees. The grant project, “Diversifying Student Pipelines in STEM: Environmental Pollution Reduction Inspired by Planetary Science,” involves collaborators from Cal State LA, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and Cal Poly Pomona. The two-year grant was awarded through NASA’s Bridge Program, designed to boost diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility within the NASA workforce and the U.S. science and engineering community. This new project will increase Cal State LA’s research capacity by building sustainable partnerships with collaborators at JPL while creating multiple research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in space-relevant STEM fields. Students will work with planetary science mentors at JPL as part of the project.
The multidisciplinary research will draw from the study of planetary science, which can be far from students’ reality, to tackle environmental pollution that is very real to them and their communities. The two main research areas investigated in this project are (1) the development of wastewater treatment technologies inspired by the origin of life chemistry on wet rocky planets and (2) the development of carbon capture and sequestration technologies inspired by the chemistry of hydrothermal chimneys.