Riju Agrawal '13 wins 2013 SAME award

Cambridge, Mass. - April 29, 2013 - The New York City Post of the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME) has awarded Harvard College senior Riju Agrawal '13 the 2013 Colonel and Mrs. S. S. Dennis, III Scholarship in recognition of his hard work and dedication to research.

In a ceremony on April 26, Cherry A. Murray, Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), presented Agrawal with a certificate of accomplishment and a scholarship check for $1,000 from SAME.

The organization has more than 27,000 members and is dedicated to advancing individual technical knowledge and the collective engineering capabilities of governments, the uniformed services, and private industry in the interest of national defense.

As an engineering sciences concentrator in the S.B. program at SEAS, Agrawal completed a senior thesis while working in the laboratory of his adviser, Chad Vecitis, Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering. Vecitis is known for his work using carbon nanotubes to develop extremely effective water filters.

Aiming to contribute to a lower-cost water filtration system for developing nations, Agrawal explored another material called carbon fabric, which would cost approximately 100 times less than the nanotubes but could not produce quite as fine-grained a filter. He created a triple-layer filter and tested it using water from Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Mass., and the Charles River, which runs through the Harvard campus.

The filter succeeded, in some tests, at removing more than 90 percent of pathogenic bacteria from the water samples, though the results varied. Agrawal's project focused on understanding the mechanism by which the carbon fabric served as a filter and working to improve the material to optimize the results.

After graduation, Agrawal intends to learn about energy technologies while working for Morgan Stanley in Houston, Tex.; he has also been accepted to Harvard Business School in the 2+2 Program, which allows him to defer attendance for two years.

While at Harvard College, he has served as vice president for external relations for the Harvard College Engineering Society and as co-president of the Harvard Global Energy Initiative, among other leadership activities.

About SAME

The Society of American Military Engineers (SAME), the premier professional military engineering association in the United States, unites architecture, engineering, construction (A/E/C), facility management and environmental entities and individuals in the public and private sectors to prepare for—and overcome—natural and manmade disasters, and to improve security at home and abroad.

Headquartered in Alexandria, Va., SAME provides its more than 27,000 members extensive opportunities for training, education and professional development through a robust offering of conferences, workshops, networking events and publications. With a membership that includes recent service academy graduates and retired flag officers, project managers and corporate executives, Department of Defense civilians, private-sector experts and everyone in between, SAME is bridging the gaps between critical stakeholders to advance the field of military engineering and help secure our nation.