UH researcher
gets Fulbright grant
Chittaranjan Ray, University of Hawaii-Manoa associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, has received a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship.
The Council of International Education's Middle East, North Africa and South Asia regional program awarded the fellowship to Ray to study the potential of riverbank filtration to produce drinking water for cities in the Ganges Plains of Nepal, India and Bangladesh.
He plans to visit the cities of Katmandu, Nepal; Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Varanasi and Patna in India; and Dacca in Bangladesh to see methods of drinking water production and potential for riverbank filtration. The process forces surface water downward through sediment to filter out potential contaminants en route to a pumping well.
One of few engineering professors to receive the Fulbright award this year, Ray joined UH in 1997 and holds joint appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Water Resources Research Center.
Besides his research on riverbank filtration, he has worked with local agricultural producers and state agencies on ground-water contamination issues. His research areas include water flow in soils and aquifers, drinking water quality and pesticide contamination of ground water.
He is investigating the leaching behavior of six chemicals at five sites on Oahu, Maui and Kauai with funding from the state Department of Agriculture. He also is co-principal investigator of a project for the Department of Health to delineate drinking water sources of all islands and identify potential contaminating activities.
He is the author of several articles, books and a monograph entitled "Pesticides in Domestic Wells" that was published by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers.
