OK, it may not be as glamorous or as self-important as the Academy Awards, aka The Oscars, but the International Desalination Association (IDA) exists and it gives out awards. That’s two new things I learned today.
IDA is a non-profit international NGO* that strives to educate people about desalination and water reuse. Its 2013 Channabasappa Memorial Scholarship has been awarded to Leila Karimi, a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Energy and the Environment, Chemical Engineering Department, New Mexico State University. Her focus, according to the award announcement, is on “the selective removal of ions in an electrodialysis reversal process as one of the inland desalination technologies that is appropriate for brackish groundwater.” Good for her, especially because Australian researchers recently concluded that there’s a whole lot more brackish, or somewhat salty, groundwater in the world than previously thought.
*(NGO, or non-governmental organization; the abbreviation is used more commonly than the spelled-out version in the development world, e.g., the world of the United Nations and various other regional and international aid organizations.)