ESR15 – Gema Amaya

Gema Amaya is an Environmental Engineer from Málaga (Spain) whose motivation for making the planet a better place to live has always led her steps. Throughout her training period and research career, she has acquired knowledge and skills in different fields of environmental engineering and management, implementing the concept of sustainable development to approach environmental problems.

After her undergraduate studies in Environmental Science (University of Malaga, Spain), she worked as an intern at Cape Eleuthera Institute, a research, educational and community service organization in the Bahamas. Throughout her tenure, she collaborated in several projects involving sustainability and research. After that, she worked for three years as a researcher in the Chemical Engineering Department at University of Malaga, focusing her research in electrochemistry for environmental remediation. She enrolled as a graduate student and research assistant at University of Illinois at Chicago to pursue a M.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering, where she led a research project in collaboration with Chicago Park District and US Forest Service for wetlands restoration. During this period, she was introduced to the concept of sustainability assessment and applied life cycle analysis to the field-scale remediation project. In order to find a new scope to solve environmental problems, she pursued another M.Sc. degree in Advanced Biotechnology (University of Malaga, Spain). She conducted research on the use of microalgae cultures in wastewater to enhance the biological treatment as part of the European Project SABANA, a large-scale integrated microalgae-based biorefinery for the production of biostimulants from waste streams. 

She now would like to take a step further in the use of sustainability assessment in environmental problem solving, by taking an Early Stage Researcher position at UCL (University College of London), to work in the ESR15 InnovEOX project “Life-cycle assessment and cost analysis of emerging eAOP technologies” in which, under the supervision of Paola Lettieri (UCL), she will perform the sustainability assessment and cost analysis of an innovative Advance Oxidative Process technology applied in wastewater treatment to efficiently degrade emerging pollutants. Gema would love to use this opportunity to make the sustainability concept and Life Cycle Assessment applicable and accessible to everyone regardless of their background, so everybody could make a small contribution to preserve the environment.