Jay Bullen wins award at Royal Society of Chemistry

Congratulations to third year CDT-ACM student Jay Bullen who has won the award for best student presentation at the Royal Society of Chemistry annual meeting on the ‘Environmental Chemistry of Water, Sediment, Soil and Air’. The event took place on Wednesday 21st November 2018 and ten students presented their research at the event.

Jay’s talk was entitled Application of an As(V)-selective chemosorbent for arsenic speciation in the field, cross-calibrated with on-site voltammetry and he presented his recent field work in the Nadia district of West Bengal, India. Jay tested two portable methods for arsenic speciation in the field: (a) Anodic Stripping Voltammetry (ASV) using the PDV6000ultra from Modern Water with a gold microwire working electrode, and (b) a novel chemosorbent resin previously developed at Imperial, to separate arsenic at the field site, later measured in the lab by ICP-MS. The resin showed successful application in synthetic groundwaters, but not in the field, seemingly due to interference by competitive complex of organic matter such as humic acids. On the other hand, the ASV method successfully speciated both synthetic waters and field samples, verified through spiking experiments, and ICP-MS analysis.