New WRRC intern selected

Each year, M&A sponsors a writing internship with the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. Created to provide opportunities for writing about environmental and water issues, the internship is open to students from all three of Arizona’s state universities. The recipient of this award contributes to the Arroyo, an annual publication of the WRRC that focuses on a critical Arizona water issue.

This year’s intern is Madhumitha Raghav, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering at the UA. Madhumitha has received several other prestigious awards: a Science Foundation of Arizona Graduate Fellowship, a Superfund Training Core Fellowship, a Best Research Abstract Award, and various travel grants, among others. For the past 2 years, she has been researching methods for stabilizing arsenic-bearing solid residuals (a product of water treatment processes) under landfill conditions. Her article “Making wastewater safe for agriculture in developing countries,” was recently published in Asian Water Magazine.

For this internship, Madhumitha plans to focus on emerging contaminants — specifically, their sources, toxicity, fate, and transport in the environment, as well as their exposure pathways, health risks, and implications for policymakers.

The next Arroyo will be published in the spring of 2013. To read this year’s Arroyo, which features the research of Josue Sanchez Esquela on water issues along the U.S.–Mexico border, click here.