Rebecca \u201cBecca\u201d\u00a0Rubinstein was recently awarded the EPA STAR Fellowship for\u00a0her research on wastewater treatment with Dr. Ranjan Srivastava. Becca is a PhD student in the UConn Environmental Engineering Program,\u00a0where her\u00a0research is focused on understanding and modeling biological wastewater treatment. Nutrients commonly found in wastewater streams, particularly nitrogen species, can seriously damage aquatic ecosystems near the outfall, and as a result are carefully regulated. The microbial\u00a0community that is largely responsible for nutrient removal from wastewater streams is very complex, changing\u00a0in response to both nutrient loading rates and ambient environmental conditions.\u00a0The objective of this project is\u00a0to characterize the chemical and microbial system in the activated sludge basin of the UConn Water Pollution Control Facility through daily sampling and analysis at various locations in the treatment basin. A machine learning approach will be applied to model the system.\u00a0The\u00a0model will\u00a0then be used to dynamically optimize\u00a0treatment conditions. In developing this model, Becca hopes to provide a useful tool for evaluating the impact of different treatment techniques or system perturbations on treatment efficiency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rebecca \u201cBecca\u201d\u00a0Rubinstein was recently awarded the EPA STAR Fellowship for\u00a0her research on wastewater treatment with Dr. Ranjan Srivastava. Becca is a PhD student in the UConn Environmental Engineering Program,\u00a0where her\u00a0research is focused on understanding and modeling biological wastewater treatment. Nutrients commonly found in wastewater streams, particularly nitrogen species, can seriously damage aquatic ecosystems near the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":115571,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1875],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1874],"class_list":["post-115570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-grad-school"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-13 22:20:03","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/115571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115570"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=115570"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=115570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}