Taina Tervahauta

Biography

Originally from Finland, Taina received her MSc degree on Environmental Technology at Tampere University of Technology in 2010. As a part of the degree she completed an exchange program in National University of Singapore in the spring semester of 2008 studying state-of-the-art water treatment technologies. After the first international experience, she decided to do her PhD at Wageningen University in the Netherlands working on resource recovery from domestic wastewater. Within this period she found her true passion in developing resource effective ecological communities based on targeted treatment of source-separated waste streams recovering energy, water, nutrients and organic matter. As a highlight of the research project she developed a new method to recover phosphate through biologically induced calcium phosphate granulation in anaerobic treatment of toilet water. After completing her PhD degree in 2014, she worked 2 years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Wetsus, in the Netherlands, applying the new phosphate recovery technology for the management of dairy manure. Currently Taina works at University of Calgary in the Energy Bioengineering Group as a Postdoctoral Fellow investigating the optimal downstream processing of algae into biofuel.