Anil Timilsina, a Ph.D. student in the Civil & Environmental Engineering department, has received the 2024 Graduate Student Award from the American Chemical Society Division of Environmental Chemistry.

The award, announced in January, recognizes graduate students working in areas related to environmental chemistry and is based in part on research activity with emphasis on the student’s potential for future contributions as professionals in environmental chemistry and engineering. Timilsina’s research involves the study of quinones — a class of compounds found in natural materials such as soil and water.

“This great honor demonstrates Anil’s excellent research productivity and creativity,” Environmental Engineering Professor Frank Yang said. “With this encouragement, hopefully, he will achieve even greater accomplishments within his Ph.D. period and beyond. Anil has already done beautiful work integrating chemical tagging with metabolomic analysis for identification of reactive organic carbon in environmental samples.”

Timilsina’s interest in soil environmental chemistry led to his research on quinones. Quinones play an important role in regulating the environmental processes and biogeochemical cycles of critical elements under climate change, including the influences of extreme events such as wildfires.

Timilsina knew this was where he wanted to focus his research; specifically on better understanding quinones. The result: Timilsina, Yang and their colleagues published a paper proposing a new way to evaluate quinones in the August 2023 issue of Analytical Chemistry. Based on his work, Timilsina also received travel stipend to present the quinone study at the January 2024 Sanibel Conference, organized by the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, in St. Petersburg, Florida.

“Our research for the first time uncovered the chemical nature of this group of compounds occurring in complex soil media,” Timilsina said.

Timilsina’s work eventually could lead to researchers’ ability to change the chemical behavior of quinones and to predict the extent of transformation when modeling climate change effects. His work aligns with one of the College of Engineering’s research pillars: engineering and designing equitable community infrastructure to mitigate cascading local, regional and global hazards, including wildfires, water issues and earthquakes.