WQRA student wins AWA award

WQRA congratulates Ana Martins on winning the 2011 AWA Undergraduate Water Prize in Victoria.

WQRA's Education Program supports a number of Honours and PhD students as part of its investment in research, and Ana is one of WQRA's Honours scholarship recipients. She also holds a scholarship from Melbourne Water.

Ana is undertaking Environmental Science with Honours at RMIT University. Her project, which examines the development of chemiluminescence methods to combine with flow injection systems for monitoring pesticides in water, is supervised by Associate Professor Nichola Porter, the Discipline Head of Environmental Science and OHS at RMIT.

Originally from Brazil, Ana was awarded a full scholarship to complete A-Levels in triple science and mathematics in London. While in England, she participated in a Science Master Class at Imperial College London and presented her work at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2003 in Cleveland, USA. 

Back in Brazil Ana worked on a Brazilian Government project at Universidade de Sao Paulo that investigated the effects of free radical damage on deoxyguanosine and the formation and stability of DNA adducts. Working with this research group made Ana more aware of the environmental pollution surrounding us at a molecular level and prompted her to enrol in the RMIT Environmental Sciences Bachelor program and pursue a career in water research.

She is hoping to continue her research at a PhD level and to specialise in the design of novel, highly specific analytical instruments for environmental analysis.

Ana will now be in the running to win the AWA's National Undergraduate Water Prize. This award aims to encourage and reward students for excellence in the field of water studies and research, and provides a forum for students to display their academic excellence and research findings to future employers, clients and the water industry. The prize is judged based on the relevance of the project to the water industry, the quality of technical content, its innovation and originality, and a paper and presentation which is given by finalists at the national annual Ozwater conference.

The Victorian AWA Undergraduate Water Prize is sponsored by GHD.

Pictured (L-R): Assoc Prof Nichola Porter, Ana Martins and WQRA Education Committee Chair Prof Felicity Roddick.