2025 Internship Project Overview

The Water and Energy Technologies (WET) lab aims to collect extensive data from water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) in order to generate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventories and mitigation strategies for each facility. Through a survey and follow-up interview, the lab is working to quantify emissions and create a standard inventorying protocol for WRRFs to use. While interning on this project, I organized data related to plant chemical usage, electricity usage and various additional plant parameters. I analyzed these parameters by generating comparative graphs to find any possible trends. Furthermore, I helped conduct interviews with WRRFs on their plant processes and GHG measurement strategies. My personal project extrapolates point measurements of silver, a common wastewater pollutant not currently regulated by the EPA, across California, in hopes of visualizing the variability of concentrations across facilities in the same region. Ultimately, data collection and emission monitoring face issues due to the lack of standardization.

ORGANIZATION/RESEARCH GROUP

Water and Energy Technologies (WET) Lab, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University

LOCATION

Princeton, New Jersey

 

Interns

Kiele Trainor ’28
Major: Civil and Environmental Engineering
"Before this internship, I declared civil and environmental engineering as my major and intended to focus on structural engineering. However, my internship exposed me to both the research and industry side of environmental engineering. Seeing the variety of environmental work options has opened my mind to possibly studying environmental engineering."

 

Z. Jason Ren
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment

Mentors

  • Emily Mayo, Ph.D. Candidate, Civil and Environmental Engineering