ManishKumar

Bio
Manish Kumar’s background combines industrial applied research with multidisciplinary academic research. His experience includes large-scale water treatment and wastewater reuse projects, the beneficial use of municipal and industrial wastewater, pilot-scale membrane studies, the development of novel bio-enabled and bio-inspired materials and processes, the application of synthetic biology to environmental solutions, membrane protein biophysics and structural biology and the exciting new area of artificial water channels.

He launched his engineering career with NCS, Inc., where he worked on arsenic treatment, as well as membrane water and wastewater treatment projects. In 2001, Kumar joined the Applied Research Department of MWH Global (now Stantec Inc.), where he worked on a range of applied research projects, including membrane water and wastewater treatment and UV disinfection of wastewater.

After earning a doctoral degree, Kumar was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Thomas Walz at Harvard Medical School, where he examined the structure and function of the eye lens Aquaporin (AQP0) in lipids and block copolymers using cryo-electron microscopy. In 2011, he joined the faculty at Penn State as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and later joined UT Austin in 2019.

Educational Qualifications
Postdoc, Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School, 2011
Ph.D., Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010
M.S., Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000
B.Tech., Chemical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India, 1998

Select Awards & Honors

• Cooperative Research Award – PMSE (2023) 
• CAREER Award – National Science Foundation(2016) 

Related Websites
Kumar Research Group
Center for Water and the Environment
Texas Materials Institute

Select Publications