Binoy Sakar (PhD Student)
University of South Australia

Project Title
Remediation of organic and inorganic contaminants by novel bio-reactive organoclays

Biography
Binoy has been fascinated by life sciences and chemistry since his school days. This prompted him to choose Agriculture for his undergraduate course (BSc Honours) and a specialization in Biochemistry and Agricultural Chemicals in BSc helped him to learn the integrated aspects of life sciences with chemistry in order to solve diverse problems in the soil environment.

Binoy secure the Junior Research Fellowship from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research to pursue his post graduation (MSc) at the prestigious Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi (2004-2006). For his MSc dissertation, Binoy worked on the impact of genetically modified cotton on soil chemical and biological processes. Later, Binoy had an opportunity to work as a Research Assistant (2006-2007) at the Department of Agricultural Biotechnology, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea.

For his PhD, Binoy is trying to combine clay mineralogy with microbiology in order to develop an effective remediation technology for environmental contaminants.

Besides working at the lab, Binoy loves to watch movies and listen to music. He is a fan of cricket and likes to play soccer.

Start Date
September 2007

Project Details
Scientific basis for the project revolves around use of clays and their modified products in combination with novel microbes for environmental remediation.

Soil and water environments have continuously been polluted with numerous pollutants of both organic and inorganic origins. The PhD project will attempt to develop a remediating material efficient to remediate some of those pollutants. To achieve this, naturally abundant clay minerals will be used as the scope of their environmental application has not been fully explored. They will be modified with certain organic molecules. The resulting products are known as organoclays. Microbial species will be introduced into the organoclays to remediate the contaminants biologically and thus the final products will be bio-reactive. As target contaminants, BTEX and phenol will be selected from organic group where as chromium and arsenic from inorganic group. This project is expected not only to come up with a new kind of remediation product, but also to open a profitable commercial avenue for developing value added products from the natural clay resources.