 I want to say that this is one of the most important gatherings one could imagine in the College of Engineering at Purdue. As you know that getting tenure at Purdue Engineering requires very high bar in many ways. And we want to congratulate publicly those colleagues who made it and also ask them to share with all of us, including some PhD students and postdocs and colleagues, what they did and what difference did those wonderful work make in research but also in learning and in engagement and impact to society. And this is the third of this semester's Celebrate Associate Professor Sirius Armin, who really is the architect along with his wonderful office behind the series is traveling today. So that's why you get a substitute like me. And I want to thank Armin and his team for doing this. And today I think we're going to celebrate Abigail and Amy and listen to their stories. If you see me exiting like before 12 o'clock just because I have another engagement. Nothing to do with your content. And I was eagerly looking forward to learning from these two now tenured faculty colleagues. And before I handed over to the two heads of the schools and divisions to which Abigail belonged, I want to highlight what tenure means. It means different things to different people. To me it meant I got a whole year devoted to child care of our first daughter and while my wife was at medical residency. So to me tenure meant a lot of diaper changes and like a dip in productivity in other dimensions for a year or two. But it was the happiest year I ever had in my life. And to others it meant that I get to imagine things outside of the box. I get to write a proposal that is risky and may not be funded. I get to maybe teach online. Maybe I get to finish that textbook. Maybe I get to think about a patent invention, a startup companies. Maybe I get to just pivot to a whole new field. Well you are free to do whatever you want to do. And that is a true unique beauty about at least American academia enterprises. Once tenured you can retire or you can dream. Please do not take that as a recommendation. You can dream really big. And we know that here at Purdue Engineering all those who get tenured after the champagne and celebration with family and friends say yes now what can I do? And what can I dream? Things that I try not to think too much about pre-tenure. So this is the most fantastic thing a faculty can have is to now sit down and think really big. And with that I would like to introduce Abigail's school heads, Nate from ABE and John from Triple E. Thank you. Hello, I'm Nate Mosier and I'm the Interim Head of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. It's my pleasure to begin the introduction of Abigail Abbey Engelberth to our program. So she will talk about her research here in a few moments. She has been a great asset to our program across all three missions of the land grant mission of a university like Purdue. She's very active in teaching at the undergraduate and the development of a critical undergraduate hands-on practical laboratory learning experience and spearheaded the development of some practical hands-on professional development and leadership opportunities for graduate students in their education as well. In addition to the research she's going to speak about in a moment. She's also actively engaged in industry collaboration and outreach and is an important member of the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering here at Purdue University as well. And so with that I would please introduce John Sutherland, the head of Triple E. Alright, thank you, Nate. My name is John Sutherland. I'm head of Environmental Ecological Engineering. We always say Triple E. It's really a fantastic pleasure to help introduce Abbey. She is one of the charter members of the Triple E faculty. In fact, she was one of the first people that Triple E hired. And it doesn't seem that long ago, but I guess it's six, seven years. She is a fantastic and inspirational teacher. She's been inspiring so many students. I've seen her teach. She does an outstanding job. She helped kind of make the Triple E curriculum, build it out and make it all happen. I'm really excited about her research because we all know that the CO2 footprint for industry is in large measure driven by the use of non-renewable resources. And Abbey is involved in working with renewable resources and making products from those. So I want to thank ABE for working with us when we hired Abbey. And it's really an honor and a pleasure to introduce Professor Abigail Engelworth. Alright, well thank you John, Nate and Maung. I know you're important when you get three people to introduce you, right? So I want to thank you for the opportunity to come talk today. I'm very excited. As you can see from me, value-added recovery is on the horizon. It was very obvious to me. My husband was like, what is that last night? So that's my little play. I'm learning now that Twitter actually has some academic sustenance. So if you are so inclined, please tweet this out. But I want to tell you a little bit about what I have been working on towards the tenure process and what I kind of see as some of the future projects. So a little bit about my path. I actually started in 2011, so eight years ago, which doesn't seem possible. But I started at the end. I started in November of 2011, so it doesn't really count. You know, there was the holidays in there and all that stuff. So it just was kind of me getting to know campus for two months. But then I started working on the whole tenure process. And the first part was, what on earth am I doing? What am I supposed to be doing? How do I do this? So it took some figuring out how to get students, how to establish the lab, how to mentor students, how to realize that they weren't all little versions of me and that they're all independent people with their own thoughts and opinions. So how do I work with them and how do I manage and make sure that they can be successful? And I've had a number of projects along the way. And I'll talk about a few selected projects. We don't have the time for me to talk about all of them. But once I was a little more established, I kind of got what I'm doing. I understood it. I was able to go after some projects that were a little bigger. And then finally, as a last push to tenure, I was able to get on some even bigger projects and kind of decide where I wanted to go. And then as I'm looking towards the future, I'm looking more at things that are, like Monk said, a little more risky, a little more exciting. So not just kind of every opportunity out there, but kind of taking a little bit of time to refocus and figure out what exactly opportunities are going to be the most fruitful and the most impactful and potentially the most interesting to me. So my research goal along the way has been for value-added product recovery. So that involves finding a product. So what is the product of interest? How do we get at it? And then how much value can it add? And this does not happen with every single project. The techno-economic analysis is a portion of my research that often gets put on the back burner. But I find it to be very exciting because it lets you know what the value-added product could be worth. But it's really hard to do on a proof of concept. So sometimes projects have to be a little more mature before you can add an economic component. A common target that I often go after is something that is eliminated or discarded, material or substance, or a byproduct that is no longer useful. So what I'm talking about is waste. So looking at wasted products or underutilized products, so low-value streams, how do we convert those into something of higher value and recover something useful out of them? So give them a life beyond what they had. Conventional wastes are things we think about, you know, garbage, things that go to the landfill, human waste, animal waste, things like that. But I'm going after what's called, or I'm thinking of, as more unconventional wastes. So there's both kind of food wastes, so these are industrial food process wastes. So spent in coffee grounds have a lot of nitrogen and oils still within them that you could extract and use. Cacao pods contain antioxidant properties, along with avocado skins, which also contain carotenoids. Ad residues such as bagasse, corn stover, and rice holes have a lot of utility left in them, but they're not necessarily used to their best value, and this is not, like, the best way for everyone to see this. But bagasse and corn stover are often used in the lignocellulosic biorefinery to create ethanol and other products of that nature. And then rice holes contain a lot of silica that can be used for silica nanoparticles, lithium ion batteries, things of that nature. Now while I don't necessarily work on all of these, these are the types of things that I go after. These kind of high val, or high volume, low value product streams. And I just really like this because I want to point out that I've actually been at this for a while. This is the cover letter for my application to graduate school in 2003-2004. I wasn't smart enough to put a date on it, apparently. This was when I was applying to my master's program at Iowa State, and I said that I would like to study how to separate a product out of a waste stream and use it to fuel the manufacture of other products. Well, that was pretty insightful for what 22-year-old me, so way to go. I figured it out right away. But I just like to show this because it really shows that I've kind of been on this path for a while, and it's something that I'm really passionate about. Now when I started out, I was really looking at bio-renewable resources, so kind of the ag residues and the bio-refinery co-products. I've expanded this a little bit more to look at other waste streams as well. So food waste, using soybean oil for a higher value product. So not just bio-refinery wastes, but other products as well. So I've kind of expanded that. So in traditional processing, you have some kind of feedstock that you make into a major product. Along that way, you can take some portion of it, do another side reaction or a side stream, and have a value-added product as well. So that's a lot of what I do. And now it's much more beyond just the biomass area and looking into other waste streams and other sources of carbon. So I want to talk to you about some selected accomplishments. Like I said, if I had talked about all of my accomplishments, we'd be here all day. No one's got time for that. One of my first projects that I did with my first Ph.D. student was recovering acetic acid from corn ethanol. So the goal of this project was to improve the fermentation of cornstover ethanol by removing an inhibitor via liquid-liquid extraction. So acetic acid is a ubiquitous inhibitor, found in all lignocellulosic biomass, and it reduces the amount of ethanol that can be produced. We were able to demonstrate that we could remove acetic acid using ethyl acetate, keep the sugar stream intact, and we were able to improve both the fermentation rate and yield. We threw our model into the National Renewable Energy Labs model in the Aspen process software, and we were able to run a techno-economic analysis. And we found by just adding in our process that you could reduce the minimum ethanol selling price by about 35 cents per gallon. So by adding in this process to take out the acetic acid, we could improve the major product and recover an additional byproduct. I also worked on the recovery of lutein and zeaxanthin from DDGS, which is dried distillers, grains, and solubles. So many acronyms. But there was evidence that DDGS contained lutein and zeaxanthin. Now, lutein and zeaxanthin are carotenoids, which are found often in the human eye, and they're found to the more you have, the better eye health you have. But you have to get them from your diet, so they're not things that you can make within your body. There was initial trials that found that if the chicken feed diet, if it were to be increased in the amount of DDGS fed to the chickens, that the amount of lutein and zeaxanthin in the yolk would increase. So that would lead us to believe that the amount of lutein and zeaxanthin in the DDGS should be fairly significant. But there were no reports at the time as to how much was in there exactly. So we did some experiments and we found that the process to make DDGS, so the corn wet milling process, actually concentrates the lutein and zeaxanthin from where it is in the corn. And this was very significant because this had not been reported yet. But this also lets us know that DDGS is a viable alternative for lutein and zeaxanthin recovery. Many of you may have seen lutein and zeaxanthin on the shelf of your pharmacy. You can buy it, you can take it, you can help your own eyes on a regular basis. It's also added often to infant formula for eye development. But the current source for lutein and zeaxanthin is marigold flower petals. So we were looking to see if potentially if there's a better way that we could get some of these compounds. And then the last project I want to touch on is recovering lactic acid from food waste. So this kind of started me into the research area of value recovery from food waste. So the goal of this project was to use food waste that was inoculated with primary sludge, so wastewater sludge, to produce high quantity and quality of lactic acid. Now lactic acid can be used to produce polylactic acid, which is used fairly regularly and commonly in 3D printing and other plastic applications. And we were able to demonstrate that our inoculation scheme was able to produce up to 58 grams per liter of L-lactic acid and L-lactic acid is the desired form of lactic acid to produce polylactic acid. And we also determined that some non-controlled variables play a significant role in lactic acid production. And what I mean by that is that researchers were looking into this but they were holding a lot of things not constant. So some researchers would get their substrates, so their food waste, and they would freeze it and then they would use it later. Some would get their food waste, they would not freeze it and they would use it right away. Some would use continuous versus intermittent pH control. And we found that these factors actually played a really significant role on how much lactic acid is produced. So we published that as well and it's been getting a lot of attention. But what's next? What's on the horizon for me? I see a lot more going into the area of food waste. This is becoming a pretty significant problem in the U.S. and globally. There's a lot of food that is discarded and it's not just food from your household. Though now whenever I see it I'm always like, oh gosh, that's just waste. But there's a lot of food waste that's produced in the industrial level. So these are things that are not edible anyways. So avocado skins, you're not going to eat those and you shouldn't. But they're good sources of carbon. So can we somehow get those and make them into something higher value? This was from a publication I put out last year comparing upgrading of some industrial food waste products using either anaerobic digestion, upgrading straight to methane to be put onto the electric power grid, or into some specialty products. And this paper was also really interesting because within the past year alone in 2019 there were 17 citations that I thought was really cool. But this was looking at how do we upgrade food waste and what are the economic trade-offs between doing a low value, high volume product like methane or some more specialty product. I'm also working with a few researchers across campus on closing the loop on food production. So looking at using food waste to power anaerobic digestion, to create carbon dioxide and methane, to power a vertical farming unit. So how can we use food waste from both the industry and potentially later on collect it from food service and households? How do we, can we use all that and close the loop from other applications? One of the interesting things about researching in waste is that there's not a lot of funding because waste is very low value. But recently I think there's gotten to be a lot more interest in the area which I think is really cool and I've seen more calls from government agencies looking at specifically food waste and other waste as well. So I see a lot going in this area which is why I'm excited that I've kind of set myself up to go more into this. In the end what I'd like is to be able to sell my own little widget on Amazon too. So can I find a waste product, make it into something really cool that you want to buy potentially four at a time? I don't know. But I thank you for your time and I hope that was helpful and I'll have time for any questions. All right, thank you Abby. We do have time for questions from the audience. Oh man, it was that good. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. So could you go back to the beautiful diagram you showed before? Are you focusing mostly on the one before? Please? Yes. Are you focusing on the west from the industry alone or is there any way to improve or we can utilize the west that come from the household or because I think it pay a really big contribution. So initially we are focused on industrial food waste and that's for a few reasons. One, it's easier to collect and get after. Two, it's more homogenous so you can do a little bit more with it. And we've also had pushed back some, we submitted a proposal and one of the reviewers thought that we were going after, it didn't say this anywhere but they just got it in their head, but that we were going after household waste, which they said that we would then encourage people to waste more food, which is just silly but there's a public perception within there. If we're going to do stuff with food waste then it's fine if I don't eat it or if it's fine then if I don't use it. So I think there's a lot to do in that area but I think getting to the household waste, it's going to take a while. Hold on, I'm sorry. Is there a regulation in US households like household should dispose their waste or you just put together on a trash can? So my research has led me to create my own compost pile at my house. After everything that I've done I realized that I wasn't composting and that I really needed to be. So now I compost. It's mostly just coffee grounds, just in a bin. But I think there's soil in there, right? There's lots of bugs and stuff. It's just emptying stuff into the compost is like so annoying. But it's made me realize that that has to be done. In West Lafayette at least there is some anaerobic digestion that happens so when you do put food down the drain and put it in your three-year garbage disposal and it goes to the treatment plant stuff does, good stuff happens with that. But when you throw it in the landfill that's not great. It then creates methane, CO2, all that from the landfill whereas that can be used, you can get that somewhere else and that would be better use. So if you can, community composting would be great. So I'm Eckhard Kroll from ME. Why are we so far behind in this in the U.S.? If you're in Europe, especially in Germany where I'm from, food or the whole waste separation is a common. It's a must. You actually get fined by your local community if you don't separate your waste and have everything that's compostable in a certain pile and then only that what needs to go into the landfill really needs to go to the landfill. So it takes a change of culture but how do we change this culture? I can tell you, I composed everything in my home in my backyard. I just dump it, but anyway. Maybe not the best way to do it. You're right. It's going to take a cultural shift and one thing I think that's really hard about the U.S. is we are a really big country. I mean, Germany, it's very small comparatively, right? So if you want to implement something there, it's almost in some ways easier to do because you're very small, but U.S. is very large and we cover a lot of geographic areas, a lot of different weather patterns, a lot of different cultures even within the U.S. So I think that is a question to bring on some social scientists to help answer because I don't know how to change the culture. I think there's going to be a lot more education and required about why people should be treating their wastes a little differently. And I'm not necessarily sure how to do that, but I know doing some research and driving the economic value of waste in a different direction would be beneficial. There was a hand over here. Is there another question? Oh, yeah. Oh, what? It's for the live stream. Yeah, I had a question about how you mentioned that marigolds are currently the only source. Are there other sources that you have come across? Oh, yeah. So a lot of the foods you eat contain lutein and zeaxanthin. So most foods that are either yellow or orange in color contain it. So bell peppers are great sources. Corn, other foods that are yellow that I can't think of right now. But also like kale and spinach, they have everything in it, so I think it's just to eat a lot of that. That's not a great commercial source for that because those are also really high value foods, so we're not going to necessarily extract it from something like that. But marigolds, it's there, and marigolds are pretty low value and easy to grow. Not necessarily easy to harvest for this type of application, but it's a high enough value product that it's done. Yes, Craig? Great job, Abby. So you focus primarily on crops, but is there an animal processing component, animal byproduct component that you're also interested in? Yes, but I haven't gotten there yet. I've mostly worked on the plant matter. The animals are a whole different ball game for me that I haven't gotten there yet. I decided not to go with the beast analogy, so... My question is maybe a bit outside of your work, but since you're working in a waste, how do you see the U.S. projection or in the future after the Chinese recycling 2018 stopping contract, how do you view the U.S. solution in the future? So I think that's going to have to be a cultural shift as well, and I don't know how to solve that problem. You're right, it is outside my scope. It's something I'm interested in just as a citizen of the planet, but I don't know how to solve that problem. But I think we're going to have to change how we interact with products that we no longer value as useful, and I don't know what that is, but it's something to definitely look forward to. All right, let's thank Abby one last time.