EREF Scholar Spotlight with Jenny Ding: Optimizing Volatile Fatty Acid Yield in Anaerobic Co-Digestion of Food Waste

Food waste presents a significant environmental and economic challenge. Join Hezhou (Jenny) Ding as she presents her innovative research focused on transforming this waste into a valuable resource. The session will detail how anaerobic co-digestion can be manipulated to maximize the production of volatile fatty acids, used in various industries, by employing a heat treatment strategy to suppress methane production. Jenny received her BEng in environmental engineering from Jiangnan University in 2017, where she spent two years working closely with ecotoxicology, studying the effects of different external factors on the photosynthesis of soybeans. After that, Jenny earned her MS from the University of Arizona in the same major. During her master’s degree, she studied the growth of Anammox bacteria. She designed a protocol for the measurement of bacteria growth rates. Jenny is now a Ph.D. candidate in environmental engineering at NC State University. Read more about her research here.