Environmental Engineering PhD student Jinjie He is working to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Originally from the Changping district of Beijing, Jinjie decided to pursue a masters with Drexel after time spent working on wastewater treatment in rural China. “After my undergrad I worked a little bit in a company in Beijing and they did water treatment for wastewater treatment for rural area and that was a very interesting topic for me and I felt I needed to learn more because there was a lot of knowledge I was lacking.”
Attracted to Drexel by Philadelphia’s city life and the quality of Drexel’s Environmental Engineering program, Jinjie quickly found herself enjoying her work with her masters supervisor, Environmental Engineering professor Christopher Sales, with whom she did water quality monitoring on the Javits Convention Center green roof in New York City.
Later, her work with Dr Sales transformed into the opportunity to stay on as a research assistant and eventually as a PhD student co-advised by Dr. Sales and Dr. Alexander Fridman at the Nyheim Plasma Institute.
With the Institute’s recent receipt of a $200,000 NSF grant for the use of plasma technology COVID-19 abatement, Jinjie is getting to put her skills to work slowing the spread of the virus. “We’re doing disinfection of personal protective equipment (PPE) and also hospital rooms. Because there’s a shortage of PPE [medical professionals] have to reuse PPE. We’re going to build them a system to decontaminate PPE so it can be re-used in as short a time as possible.”
“My job in this project is to help them test how much virus they kill. So the process should be [that] we add some virus to a surface and we use plasma on this surface to try to kill the virus and then I take those materials out and test how much is left on the surface. Ideally we kill all of the virus.”
Once she’s completed her PhD, Jinjie hopes to continue her engineering career in industry. “I’m very interested in the cross between plasma and environmental engineering. I think there's a lot of things I could do in this area.”
Read more about the cold Plasma air filter research being performed with Dr. Fridman.