CEE Student a Finalist in Shell Ideas360 Competition

5/6/2015 Kristina Shidlauski

Graduate student named a finalist in an international competition designed to foster innovation in the areas of energy, water and food.

Written by Kristina Shidlauski

CEE at Illinois graduate student Daniel Mosiman has been named a finalist in Shell Ideas360, a Royal Dutch Shell PLC competition designed to encourage students to explore solutions to energy, water and food problems around the world.

Mosiman teamed with Stephen Sentanu—a student at Makerere University in Uganda—to develop an affordable method of removing toxic levels of fluoride from water. Mosiman met Sentanu on a research trip to Africa, where they discovered they were researching similar topics. Their common interests made teaming up for the competition a logical choice.

Calling themselves Team Fluorasorb, they submitted a video that outlined how to create an affordable water filter designed to last significantly longer than those currently in use in impacted areas. Ongoing use of the filters will be encouraged by creating financial management programs and a replacement notification service, and using spent material buy-back incentives. The spent material can be converted to value-added products such as additives to animal feed and filler for construction materials.

“I think that the competition is really cool because it’s a way to foster innovation and thinking about these challenges,” Mosiman said. “The overall themes of the competition are energy, water and food. So I think it’s just really cool because it’s a good mechanism to think about these issues in a broader context and come up with ideas that are viable.”

Mosiman’s adviser, CEE department head and professor Benito J. Mariñas, encouraged Mosiman to enter the competition.

“Daniel is using an interdisciplinary approach in his research on fluoride removal from contaminated water that integrates innovative technology development with business model implementation,” Mariñas said. “I think that with this approach he will be successful in developing fluoride control technologies that will be embraced by the many communities in East Africa that currently drink water with toxic levels of fluoride.”

Only five proposals out of nearly 1,100 submissions have made it to the finals (the other finalists are from Singapore, the United Kingdom, Qatar and Malaysia). For the last step in the competition, Mosiman and Sentanu will travel to the Netherlands in May 2015 where they will receive three days of coaching before pitching their idea to Shell executives, innovators and industry leaders. The ultimate winners will be awarded a National Geographic Adventure of their choice.

“Just getting to the finals has encouraged me to keep thinking about this as something that could be potentially viable down the road,” Mosiman said. “It’s part of the reason I decided to stay [at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] for my Ph.D.— to keep the momentum on the research I’m doing.”


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This story was published May 6, 2015.