Custer Speaker Series — Dr. Lucy Mar Camacho
Open to the public, our speaker series is designed for students and community members to hear from professionals on topics that broaden attendees’ understanding of the world and add depth to experiences. It is also an opportunity for our alumni and community members to engage with our students, potential future employees.
“Next-Generation Thermal Desalination and Membrane Technologies for Clean Water”
About this talk: Escalating water stress, industrial growth and climate change are driving urgent demand for treatment technologies that can handle highly contaminated and high-salinity wastewaters, from textile and cosmetic effluents to reverse osmosis brines. Conventional biological and pressure-driven membrane processes remain essential, but their performance is often limited by energy use, fouling and challenges in treating complex waste streams. In this talk, Camacho will discuss emerging opportunities in thermal desalination and membrane distillation, including solar-driven systems that can leverage low-grade or waste heat to recover high-quality water from concentrated industrial effluents. Camacho will highlight how thermodynamic and exergy-based frameworks enable fair comparison of diverse technologies and guide the design of more efficient systems. The talk will also explore recent advances in membrane materials and module engineering, such as tailored hydrophobic and hybrid membranes for robust operation under harsh conditions, along with data- and AI-assisted approaches for navigating the many variables that control performance, fouling and energy efficiency. Throughout, the focus will be on connecting fundamental transport and thermodynamics to scalable, system-level solutions, emphasizing opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration across chemical, civil, environmental and mechanical engineering to accelerate sustainable water treatment.
About Dr. Camacho: Dr. Lucy Mar Camacho is a Program Director in the Environmental Engineering and Sustainability Cluster of the Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems (CBET) Division at the National Science Foundation and an associate professor of environmental engineering at Texas A&M University–Kingsville. Her research focuses on desalination and concentrate management, including membrane distillation and electrodialysis metathesis for zero-liquid-discharge systems, the adsorption of heavy metals such as uranium and arsenic using natural and engineered sorbents and the development of graphene oxide–based membranes and adsorbents for advanced water treatment. She also works on sustainable water reuse, recovery of valuable co-products from wastewaters and solidification/stabilization of hazardous wastes, with a strong emphasis on the water–energy nexus. Dr. Camacho has published extensively in these areas and is active in several professional societies dedicated to desalination, membranes, water quality and environmental engineering education.
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