Opportunities
For information about the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology or active candidate searches, please contact Bruce Rittmann. General inquiries should be directed to [email protected].
Current opportunities
All open positions are posted on the Biodesign Institute website:
What our colleagues have to say
I want to thank The Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology for continuing to host the Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance. Your infrastructural support and work on our Advisory Committee have been pivotal in helping us get off the ground and stabilize a North American sustainability initiative that will protect our waters from the deleterious effects of nutrient pollution from farms, cities and other sources. In addition, I’m grateful that you’ve provided me with the resources I needed to manage the National Science Foundation’s Phosphorus Sustainability Research Coordination Network, which has been prodigious over the years in its output of scientific articles, workshops and seminars.
The Swette Center has enabled collaboration across multiple fields and provided my graduate school training with tools and resources that otherwise would not be available to me. I want people to understand how important microbiology is to everyday life and how often we rely on microbiological processes without even knowing.
My research focuses on managing microbial communities to provide services on sustainable closed-loop processes. To be more specific, I am working on bacteria mediated removal, recovery and reuse. This requires interdisciplinary partnership, which is enabled in the Swette Center owing to its famous culture of cross-disciplinary and team-based research. In addition, our seed project on palladium has made several milestone achievements including three literature publications, one international PCT patent application and formation of one company. These would not have been possible without the Swette Endowment.
What I love about the Swette Center is that we are focused on making lemonade out of lemons – turning overlooked and underappreciated waste streams into energy, clean water and valuable byproducts. My work in the Swette Center allows me to explore this hidden potential through cutting edge technologies like microbial electrochemical cells and fundamental tools like chemical and molecular tools and mathematical modeling. When combined, these tools are leading to faster and more efficient commercialization of technologies that will facilitate clean water production and energy recovery in the first and third worlds.
The Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology has enabled me to maximize the number of questions I can ask, trends I can visualize from data and collaborators to work with as a researcher. I am a third year Microbiology PhD student that studies how to stimulate methane production in solid waste landfills with the intention to incentivize it for combustion into energy and/or other sustainable bio-based products. Simply stated, BSCEB is a helpful and engaging community to be a member of not simply because of the sheer number of bright-minds in the center, but also the resources available throughout the labs.
The Swette Center has greatly benefited my education…I have always wanted an environmental focus for my education and volunteering for the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology has given me the resources I needed to fulfill this goal. I am currently volunteering for course credit by assisting Steven Hart with his research for testing the degradation of municipal sewage sludges under different systems and conditions. Through his helpful instruction, I am proud to say that I have been accepted to do a presentation at the WEF Residuals and Biosolids conference in May 2018. Through the helpful instruction and support of the Swette staff, I feel excited to achieve my career goals.
Support the Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology
Managing microbial communities that provide services to make society more sustainable.