Maria Lousada Ferreira PhD

Maria is an environmental engineer, with a PhD in wastewater treatment. She has been working for more than 20 years on how to combine environmental preservation with economic/social growth. Her interests are the following: how to safely close the water urban cycle; how to explore the immense potential of wastewater to produce energy and materials; and how to develop water/wastewater sustainable technology. Maria has been working at KWR since 2019, and she has contributed to research projects, consultancy tasks, and development of international research ambitions, mainly in the fields of industrial and municipal wastewater treatment, but also supporting other groups/initiatives such as the sewage surveillance team. At KWR Maria is currently engaged in projects related to removal of micro-pollutants in wastewater, membrane filtration in wastewater treatment, reuse of treated wastewater and use of solar panels in water reservoirs. Maria has academic, industrial and governmental working experience, with multiple research projects at national and international level in fields such as wastewater membrane filtration, resource recovery, reuse of treated wastewater and capacity building in developing and less-developed countries. Maria started her career in Portugal, after graduating at the Nova University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences and Technology. At Portugal she worked at the University of Beira Interior, Natural-park International River Douro and ANCOTEQ, a cheese production facility for farmers of a biologically certified sheep-race. After working 13 years in Portugal, Maria came to the Netherlands to do a PhD at the Water Management department of the TU Delft, which she completed in 2011. Her PhD thesis was entitled “Filterability and sludge concentration in Membrane Bioreactors”. At the Netherlands, Maria worked at Evides Industriewater and returned to the TU Delft to do a post-doc with Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactors.