Faculty Investigator, Seed

Manish Kumar is an associate professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil, Architecture, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.  He was previously an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Penn State. He works in the areas of desalination and water purification membranes, membrane protein structure and biophysics, membrane protein enhanced synthetic block copolymer membranes, and on developing artificial membrane proteins and biocompatible electrical interfaces. The overarching interest of his group, however, is in developing novel strategies to improve the performance of separation membranes using truly interdisciplinary approaches and to think about molecular transport in membranes of all types of membranes. He has been recognized by the NSF CAREER award and is currently serving on the board of directors for the North American Membrane Society.

Manish received his bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in Trichy, India in Chemical Engineering. He completed an MS in environmental engineering at the University of Illinois, and then worked for approximately seven years in the consulting industry on applied research projects (lab, pilot, and full scale) on membranes for water and wastewater treatment. Manish returned to Illinois to complete a PhD in the area of biomimetic membranes and then conducted postdoctoral research at the Harvard Medical School on the structure of water channel proteins, aquaporins using CryoEM.