Jay Bullen visits Kolkata in India to present his research

Cohort 3 student Jay Bullen travelled to West Bengal during October to present his work on bifunctional photocatalyst-sorbent materials at a workshop entitled Towards a new generation of arsenic treatment plants in India. The workshop was held at the CSIR-Central Glass & Ceramic Research Institute in Kolkata, and participants discussed the public health crisis caused by arsenic contaminated waters, and future strategies to overcome the current challenges facing the provision of safe drinking water.

Jay who is supervised by Dr Dominik Weiss then spent three days conducting field work, cross-calibrating two new speciation techniques for determining the distribution of arsenic between +3 and +5 oxidation states. The first was a novel chemosorbent resin developed at Imperial College London, for use as a syringe filter device. The second was Anodic Stripping Voltammetry with a gold microwire electrode, an electrochemical technique, with sub-ppb detection limits.