Research & Field Projects

Community-Based Monitoring (CBM) Program

LEAD: Dr. Claire Herbert

Partnering with Indigenous and northern communities to monitor freshwater quality and quantity, weaving local and traditional knowledge together with scientific data to guide water stewardship.

Manitoba Great Lakes Program

LEAD: Dr. Claire Herbert

A long-term research and stewardship initiative on Lake Winnipeg and Manitoba's great lakes, addressing nutrient loading, harmful algal blooms and overall watershed health.

Landfill Leachate Treatment Using Aerobic Granular Reactors

LEAD: Dr. Susant Kumar Padhi (Department of Civil Engineering)

Developing compact aerobic granular sludge reactors to treat highly contaminated landfill leachate and protect groundwater and surface water from pollution.

Waste-to-Functional Aerogels for Clean and Safe Water Purification

LEAD: Prof. Bimlesh Lochab (Department of Chemistry)

Converting agricultural and industrial waste into low-cost functional aerogels that adsorb contaminants, enabling affordable and scalable water purification.

Persistent Pollutant Removal and Advanced Water Treatment

LEAD: Prof. Subhabrata Sen (Department of Chemistry) & Prof. V. M. Rajesh (Department of Chemical Engineering)

Advanced oxidation and membrane processes engineered to remove persistent organic pollutants and emerging contaminants from drinking and waste water.

Charcoal Briquette: Turning an Invasive Water Hyacinth into an Opportunity

LEAD: Prof. Bikramjit Rishi (School of Management and Entrepreneurship)

Repurposing invasive water hyacinth into clean-burning charcoal briquettes — restoring choked waterways while creating sustainable rural livelihoods.

Carcross/Tagish First Nation Water Governance Project

LEAD: Dr. Nicole Wilson

Supporting the Carcross/Tagish First Nation in building community-led water governance grounded in Indigenous rights, self-determination and stewardship.

Just Waters: Thinking with Hydro-Social Relations

LEAD: Dr. Adele Perry

A humanities-led inquiry into the social, cultural and political relationships that shape how communities live with, value and govern water.

Developing Durable Self-Cleaning Surfaces

LEAD: Prof. Harpreet Singh Grewal (Professor, School of Engineering), Prof. Harpreet Singh Arora (School of Engineering)

Bioinspired Fog Water Harvesting

LEAD: Prof. Harpreet Singh Grewal (Professor, School of Engineering)

This study develops an eco-friendly fog-harvesting surface for water-scarce arid regions, made by stamping hydrophobic patches onto a superhydrophobic PDMS substrate — a simple technique that avoids complex instrumentation and hazardous fluorine-based chemicals. Unlike conventional designs that use hydrophilic regions to anchor droplets, this system uses hydrophobic patches to minimize contact pinning and promote fast droplet shedding. The superhydrophobic background (water contact angle ~160°, ultra-low adhesion ~2 μN) enables rapid droplet transport and surface clearance for new droplets. The authors systematically varied patch chemistry, geometry, size, arrangement, and area fraction, finding that circular patches gave the best performance by streamlining flow and reducing retention. This achieved a high fog collection rate of ~24 kg m⁻² h⁻¹. The surface also shows desalination promise through anti-fouling, thermal stability, and water repellency. It proved remarkably durable — surviving thermal cycling (−80 °C to 350 °C), UV, abrasion, and ultrasonication — and retained efficiency for over a year under harsh conditions. Overall, it offers a fluorine-free, scalable route to sustainable large-scale atmospheric water capture.

Advanced Solar Thermal Desalination Systems

LEAD: Dr. Harender (Associate Professor, School of Engineering)