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.