Camilah Powell’s timing was unfortunate.
In February 2020, she was awarded a two-year Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to research water desalinization at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Later in the year, Israel closed its borders to non-citizens in an effort to contain the spread of COVID-19, and more recently has halted all travel into and out of the country.
“I’m anxious to start my research, of course,” said Powell, who earned her Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering (ChBE) from Rice last May. “I’ll be working with Christopher Arnusch in the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research. The borders will have to open again eventually.”
For now, she’s working as a modeling and simulation chemical engineer for NASA at ERC Inc. in Houston. Her Fulbright proposal, “The Living and Self-Cleaning Water Treatment Membrane,” will have to wait.
“I’m actually very fortunate,” she said. “Often in my life I’ve met the right people who were able to help me and give me a leg up. That includes my parents.”
Powell was born in Japan, where her father was stationed with the U.S. Army. She lived there the first three years of her life and subsequently on six or seven military bases in the U.S. Her family finally settled in San Antonio. There her mother earned a Ph.D. in education from the University of Incarnate Word and now teaches at IDEA Carver Academy, a public charter school also in San Antonio.
“They always encouraged me, as did a calculus teacher in high school. That’s where I got interested in chemistry, though I already was thinking about engineering,” she said.
Powell went on to earn her B.S. in engineering science from Trinity University in San Antonio in 2014. While there she was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, a program funded by the U.S. Department of Education and designed to prepare undergraduate students for doctoral studies.
Her senior design project at Trinity involved recovering the water used in the oil and gas industry’s hydraulic fracturing process. At Rice, Powell worked as a research assistant in the Catalysis and Nanomaterials Laboratory of Michael Wong, chair of ChBE and the William M. McCardell Professor in Chemical Engineering.
“Professor Wong is a stellar researcher and an excellent teacher. He advocates for his students. I am a turtle by nature. He helped me get out of myself and face my fears,” said Powell, who became a NEWT (Nano-Enabled Water Treatment) fellow and served on its Student Leadership Council.
She has co-authored 13 journal articles. In the summer of 2018, Powell worked as a summer intern with NASA as a member of its Environmental Control and Life Support Systems Team.
Powell’s dream, after her postdoctoral work in Israel, is to teach science and engineering at a small liberal arts university. Teaching, for her, outweighs research in importance.
“People have always been very nice and generous to me. I would like to give back a little of what they have given me,” Powell said.