Sara Tejedor is researcher at the IMDEA Water Institute

Sara Tejedor, researcher at the IMDEA Water Institute and belonging to the Bioelectrogenesis Group,  defended her doctoral thesis at the University of Alcalá.

The thesis, framed within the Doctoral Program in Hidrology and Water Resources Management, is entitled "Merging microbial electrochemical systems with conventional reactor designs for treating wastewater” and has been supervised by Dr. Abraham Esteve Núñez. 

Microbial electrochemistry has emerged as a new subdiscipline of biotechnology based on the study of interactions between microorganisms and electrodes. The catalytic properties of these microorganisms are very versatile and a variety of fields can benefit from them through the development of microbial electrochemical technologies (METs).

The application of METs to real scale depends on the resolution of microbiological, technological and economic challenges. This thesis has explored new scenarios and strategies to overcome the technological bottlenecks of the METs in their application for the treatment of wastewater. For this purpose, the fusion of configurations of classical reactors such as fluidized beds or activated sludge with microbial electrochemical technologies has been studied. The use of this type of design would allow simple prototypes to be installed on a large scale to evaluate novel technologies such as METs, which would otherwise be stagnant in the laboratory scale.