The Environmental Sensors Lab develops new sensors, instruments, field study strategies, and data science approaches to optimize our ability to study the natural and built environments.  Our interdisciplinary team brings together engineers and scientists with different interests, perspectives, and expertise to tackle important challenges in science, remediation, energy, and manufacturing processes:  characterizing nutrients in natural systems at high spatial and temporal frequency, enabling next-generation wastewater treatment (and resource recovery) strategies, understanding the connectivity between infrastructure, air quality, and the human experience of urban spaces, and more. Partnerships with municipal governments, community-based organizations, local and regional agencies, and others is critical to grounding the work in near-term solution development and implementation, and our work directly supports design of new options for city infrastructure and underpinning policy development in the context of budgetary constraints.

In these projects we combine a deep understanding of environmental chemistry and collaborative process characterization with unique use of embedded systems, electronic and electrochemical sensors, wireless sensor networking, data science and machine learning, and closed-loop controls.  The lab has both an electronics/sensors development space, housed at the Northeastern Marine Science Center in Nahant, MA, and a chemistry lab (general chemistry and trace-metal clean) on Northeastern’s Boston campus, welcoming contributions from many dimensions of expertise in tackling these challenges!