Contact Information

                        The University of Notre Dame

                        Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences

                        156 Fitzpatrick Hall

                        Ph: (574) 631-4534    Fax: (574) 631-9236

Super student - Qiang Yu

Background

I am from Chongqing, China, which is located in the southwest portion of the country.  I received my bachelor’s degree from Beijing University of Chemical Technology. After graduation, I worked at Bridgestone Tire (Wuxi) for about 2 years, and was intrigued by the industrial wastewater generated from the factory. This inspired me to complete a master’s degree at Tsinghua University, China. My thesis focused on perflorinated compound removal from water by adsorption processes. 

I joined Dr. Fein’s research group in January 2012 and look forward to furthering my studies in environmental geochemistry.

Research

As a reactive metal sink in the environment, bacteria can actively adsorb various metals by their abundant functional groups within cell envelopes, which not only changes the speciation, distribution and mobility of metals, but also can either facilitate or inhibit the transformation of metals associated with bacteria such as precipitation, biomineralization and redox reactions. Despite the low abundance of sulfhydryl sites within cell envelopes, recent spectroscopic evidences suggest that they may dominate the adsorption of some metal cations (Hg, Cd, etc.) onto bacteria under low metal loading conditions.