National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI)

Innovating for a water and energy secure future for the United States

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NAWI and the NextGen Program are seeking participants for the 2025 – 2026 mentorship program (Oct. 2025 – March 2026). Applications are due on October 1, 2025 – apply today!

Apply to be a Mentee
Apply to be a Mentor

About the Program

The NAWI NextGen Mentorship Program leverages the NAWI Network’s experiences and expertise to:

  • Foster meaningful connections across career stages and disciplines
  • Empower young professionals to learn from mentors and peers
  • Build relationships that support professional and personal growth

Mentor-mentee groups pair mentors, who are typically further along in their education or career, with at least one early-career mentee. We anticipate offering several types of mentorship programs this year, including groups focused on PhD Advice, Careers in Industry, Careers in Academia, and Careers in National Labs. Availability will depend on interest.

The program consists of six mentor-mentee meetings and three career-focused webinars scheduled between October 2025 and March 2026. There are opportunities for limited participation if you are unable to commit to the entire program.

Who Can Apply

Anyone excited about water technologies – whether you’re just starting out or already building your career!

  • Mentees: Undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, early-career professionals, or professionals interested in a career transition
  • Mentors: Postdocs, research staff, faculty, and experienced professionals from industry, academia, and national labs

NAWI affiliation is not required for participation.

Mentor and Mentee Expectations

Mentors will:

  • Help mentees set and achieve professional development goals
  • Provide guidance based on discussions with mentees
  • Facilitate professional connections for mentees
  • Share life experiences openly with mentees and maintain confidentiality

Mentees will:

  • Define career goals and self-assess professional strengths and areas for improvement
  • Work with mentor to develop a plan for achieving career goals
  • Actively schedule and participate in meetings
  • Seek feedback, be receptive to coaching, share successes and setbacks, and maintain confidentiality

How to Apply

If you are interested in participating in the NAWI NextGen mentorship program, please complete the program application, in which you’ll share your aspirations, educational background, personal interests, and more. Applications are due Oct. 1, 2025. We will announce matching results on Oct. 6, 2025.

Apply to be a Mentee
Apply to be a Mentor

For more information, email the NextGen mentorship program lead, Hannah Holmes, at  with questions!

Hannah Holmes’s journey from a small town in southern Illinois to the research labs at Stanford University was driven by curiosity and a passion for making science meaningful, especially for communities like the one where she grew up.

Raised in a town of just 4,000 residents, she had little early exposure to science. That changed in high school when a chemistry class sparked her curiosity. Her interest grew after shadowing a female chemical engineer at the oil refinery where her father worked. Inspired by the field’s use of science and math to solve real-world problems, she went on to study chemical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Hannah’s academic path has spanned several scientific areas, all of which have focused on pollutant removal and reuse. At the University of Illinois, she worked on electrochemical processes that transform carbon dioxide into fuels and chemicals. During her Ph.D. studies at Georgia Tech, her research centered on carbon capture from air or flue gas. After a post-seminar conversation with Stanford’s Will Tarpeh, she shifted her focus to water-based separations, leading to her current role as a postdoctoral researcher in his lab.

At Stanford, she is developing electrochemical processes to recover nutrients from wastewater. Her work involves building low-impact systems to recover critical nutrients like phosphate, an essential component of agricultural fertilizers. After fertilizer application, excess nutrients carried by irrigation or rainfall to lakes and reservoirs can cause large algae blooms, which harm both the environment and human health. A key project uses a hybrid electrochemical ion exchange process to recover phosphate as fertilizer through electrochemical regeneration, a lower-carbon, more cost-effective alternative to conventional chemical methods. She explains, “By recovering phosphate as fertilizer, we can close the loop and transform pollutants back into valuable products.”

What sets her research apart is its multi-scale approach. One day she might analyze molecular-level adsorption mechanisms with synchrotron tools; the next, evaluate broader impacts through technoeconomic and life cycle analysis. This range allows her to approach each challenge from both molecular and systems-level perspectives. She notes that while adsorbent and electrochemical processes have been scaled independently, integrating them shows great promise. “There’s a path forward for integrated systems,” she says.

Her interest in environmental technologies is rooted in a pivotal undergraduate lecture on the disproportionate effects of climate change on rural areas. “I wanted to use my chemical engineering background to help places like my hometown,” she recalls.

Looking ahead, Hannah hopes to expand her work to other pollutants—both gaseous and aqueous—and envisions “refineries of the future” that turn waste into valuable products using scalable, energy-efficient technologies. But she acknowledges that technical innovation alone is not enough. “We still need buy-in from funders and treatment facilities,” she says, citing the inertia and limited incentives that can slow real-world adoption.

Although her work is highly technical, Hannah emphasizes the human side of science. She values in-person interactions—especially at conferences—for building authentic, lasting relationships. As a member of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) NextGen Leadership Committee, Hannah recently helped lead a mixer during the NAWI quarterly review meeting to encourage interaction and collaboration among graduate students, postdocs, and early-career water researchers.

Mentorship plays a central role in Hannah’s life. As an undergraduate, she was placed in a program for students considered less likely to succeed. That experience, and the support it provided, helped define her approach to science and mentoring. “Everything I’ve accomplished is because mentors positively influenced the trajectory of my life, and I would love to provide that same support for others,” she says. “Mentoring students and seeing them advance on their own paths is one of my proudest achievements.”

In fall 2025, she will lead the mentorship program for the NAWI NextGen Leadership Committee. She is eager to involve mentees in the process and help early-career researchers connect and grow. As part of the program last year, Hannah advised Ph.D. students on maximizing productivity, finding early-career positions, and achieving a healthy work-life balance. As for the latter, she shares straightforward advice for Ph.D. students: “Take breaks, get outside, and stay proactive about communication with your mentor and collaborators.”

Outside the lab, Hannah enjoys walking around campus, spending time in nature, and playing with her cat, Friday. During the final year of her Ph.D., a visit to Climeworks’ direct air capture facility in Switzerland reminded her that the technologies she works on aren’t just theoretical—they are already being deployed. The site, one of the world’s first commercial-scale direct air capture plants, used modular units to extract carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere for storage or reuse.

As she prepares to apply for faculty positions in chemical engineering, she stays focused on what initially drew her to science—curiosity and a desire to make a difference—along with what has sustained her commitment: mentoring the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Cost optimization models for emerging water treatment processes benefit from holistic assessment of an entire process, including considerations for pretreatment, which can be costly. Previous optimization models have not accounted for the impact of chemical phenomena that occur during water treatment, such as chemical reactions that occur during pretreatment and mineral scaling in membrane treatment processes.

Mineral scaling—the buildup of minerals in a membrane, affecting its performance—presents a critical challenge to achieving high water recovery rates. As researchers refine desalination designs, they must consider the cost tradeoffs of reducing mineral scaling with desalination processes. Modeling frameworks should account for many variables in addition to mineral scaling as high-recovery treatment trains are optimized.

NAWI researchers Oluwamayowa Amusat, Adam Atia, Tim Barthlomew, and Alexander Dudchenko developed a cost optimization modeling framework for the technoeconomic assessment of desalination systems with mineral scaling and precipitation incorporated. The work—published in ACS ES&T Engineering—details a framework that includes mathematical optimization of complex processes with detailed water chemistry predictions for phenomena like mineral scaling and precipitation.

NAWI’s framework is generalizable and is demonstrated through its application to hypothetical high-recovery treatment trains for brackish and seawater desalination, centered on high-pressure reverse osmosis (HPRO), an emerging technology that shows significant promise for advanced desalination applications. This is the first technoeconomic assessment to incorporate mineral scaling predictions and chemical pretreatment into HPRO optimization. The approach includes a technoeconomic assessment on a conceptual treatment train that includes chemical pretreatment—soda ash softening and recarbonation—and membrane-based desalination in standard and HPRO.

The framework anticipates pretreatment, cost, and operational requirements needed for high recovery desalination that is cost effective and feasible. Results show that the overall cost of treatment is dominated by the soda ash softening process, while a pH control step is needed to control calcium carbonate scaling, which is critical for reaching higher water recoveries in seawater and brackish water treatment. The findings indicate that more research into reducing the cost of scaling control is worthy of further investigation.

The research emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach to optimization design, where pretreatment and primary treatment considerations are incorporated as key elements for cost-optimal operation.

The Water treatment Technoeconomic Assessment Platform (WaterTAP) is NAWI’s flagship modeling and technoeconomic analysis (TEA) software tool. Through the development of WaterTAP, NAWI seeks to help those in the water community perform rigorous TEA of current and novel water treatment unit processes and systems through an integrated modeling and simulation capability. Now we need your help to expand the accessibility and use of WaterTAP.

Whether you are a novice when it comes to WaterTAP or have some experience and wish to deepen your knowledge, we invite you to apply to join the fall cohort of the WaterTAP Academy by June 30, 2025, to learn and enhance your skills in a structured learning environment.

What You’ll Learn and When

In the first cohort of the WaterTAP Academy, participants will learn to use WaterTAP with the goal of applying it to a specific problem or project of their choosing. Participants will be taught in a set of weekly online workshops and lectures by WaterTAP experts, and will also receive one-on-one support during office hours as they develop their project models. The Fall 2025 WaterTAP Learning Cohort takes place over 8 weeks:

  • The first two weeks of November 2025
  • The first two weeks of December 2025
  • All four weeks of January 2026.

Who Should Apply

Applicants from across the water treatment innovation ecosystem are encouraged to apply, including:

  • Consulting engineers who seek to rigorously compare the performance and cost of different variations of advanced water treatment trains;
  • Academic and industrial researchers seeking to evaluate the marginal value of new treatment unit processes in the context of complete treatment trains; and/or
  • Water treatment technology developers seeking to quantify the operational and cost improvements possible with new materials (e.g. membranes) unit processes or treatment trains.
  • WaterTAP Academy participants should have a little experience using Python (though not required) and have general familiarity with water treatment process modeling. Applicants should bring a targeted question or modeling objective relevant to their current work as NAWI experts will work to customize course materials to meet participants’ needs and skill levels.

Questions?

Please reach out to Adam Atia, copying , if you have questions. Learn more about WaterTAP.

Apply today!