Dr. Paola A. Baldaguez Medina, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico’s Mayagüez campus (RUM), has received a $278,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop technologies aimed at water desalination. The award comes through the NSF EPSCoR Research Fellows Program, which supports faculty in the early stages of their teaching careers and boosts their research projects through collaborations with centers of scientific excellence.
Under the initiative, Baldaguez Medina will conduct research at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois during the summers of 2027 and 2028. There she will develop the project titled "Biomass-Derived Carbon Electrodes for Capacitive Deionization and Critical Material Recovery: Mechanistic Characterization and Implementation," focused on developing biomass-derived materials for electrochemical technologies tied to water desalination and the recovery of critical materials.
Baldaguez Medina said the stays will expand her research program at RUM, including in developing and characterizing biomass-derived materials, and will give students the chance to take part for two consecutive summers, gaining access to a national laboratory’s infrastructure and later transferring that knowledge to work at the institution. Since joining the Chemical Engineering faculty in 2024, she has focused on electrochemical technologies for water treatment, including desalination, detection and removal of contaminants, and selective recovery of materials of interest.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at RUM and a master’s and doctorate in chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.