GMU and Prizes

GMU people study prizes, sponsor prizes and we win some also!  Must be something in the water.

A George Mason University chemistry professor has won a $1 million engineering prize for developing a simple and inexpensive means of filtering arsenic from well water, an advance that is already preventing serious health problems in hundreds of thousands of people in his native Bangladesh and could help millions of others around the world.

The 2007 Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability, administered by the National Academy of Engineering, will go to Abul Hussam of Centreville, academy officials announced yesterday...

His final creation -- an easy-to-make, maintenance-free, two-tiered system that uses sand, charcoal, bits of brick and shards of a widely available kind of cast iron -- removes virtually every trace of arsenic from well water. It wowed an independent panel of engineering academy judges who, under the rules of the prize, were looking for an affordable, reliable, socially acceptable and environmentally friendly solution to the arsenic problem that did not require electricity.

Prize rules also required that the product be proven in field conditions, not just in a lab....The 2007 sustainability prize is the first in a series to be funded by the Grainger Foundation of Lake Forest, Ill., created in 1949 by an electrical engineer.

Thanks to Nitpicker for the pointer.