Akanksha Menon
DIRECTOR OF THE WATER–ENERGY RESEARCH LAB AT THE GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
FROM TOY ROCKETS TO BOOKS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, Akanksha Menon can point to a number of influences that guided her toward engineering. But she vividly remembers a moment at the 2012 ASME Energy Sustainability Conference where, as an undergrad student exploring different career paths, something clicked: “I saw textbook concepts being applied to design real world systems and realized, oh my gosh, this is what I want to do. This is my community.”
Today, Menon runs the Water Energy Research Lab (WERL) at Georgia Tech, where she’s advancing scalable technologies that sit at the nexus of two critical resources: water and energy.
Menon’s lab is developing thermal desalination systems to recover clean water from highly saline waste streams such as brine from reverse osmosis or produced water from oil and gas operations. Standard membrane technologies struggle with these concentrated sources and leave behind large volumes of brine, Menon explained, which is costly to manage. Her team’s system, based on Air Gap Diffusion Distillation (AGDD), operates at ambient pressure using engineered polymer surfaces to prevent salt buildup and corrosion. With integrated heat recovery and high thermal efficiency, the technology aims to recover more than 90 percent of water and lower the cost of treatment.
“Membrane-based desalination like reverse osmosis is the state of the art for seawater desalination,” said Menon. “But with oil and gas, you have a lot of produced water, which membranes struggle to deal with. We’re trying to extract more than 95 percent of the water from those streams.” What remains, she added, can be mined for valuable materials like lithium, cobalt, and manganese—linking water recovery to critical mineral supply.
Akanksha Menon has a hidden talent: singing. She was trained in Indian classical music for nearly a decade—and yes, there’s a private YouTube channel, but it’s strictly for friends and family.
“There are still these stereotypes of mechanical engineers being people who love cars and big machines. But to me, mechanical engineering really gives you this mindset to design things and learn problem solving—and then allows you to specialize in whatever area you want.”
—Akanksha Menon
Alongside this work, her team is developing thermochemical energy storage systems, or “thermal batteries,” that can store and dispatch heat, not just electricity. Applications range from heating buildings to supporting high-temperature industrial processes, like glass and cement manufacturing. The lab’s work spans the design of materials and systems that can cycle (charge-discharge) thousands of times without degradation and is being funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
“The lithium ion batteries we use every day are based on electrochemical reactions that have been developed over a hundred years,” said Menon. “But the active materials are expensive and they only work well over short durations. With thermochemical batteries, we’re subjecting salts and rocks to reactions that can enable long duration storage at a very low cost.”
Growing up in the Middle East, Menon had early exposure to the U.S. education system at the Texas A&M University at Qatar. “There were a lot of visiting faculty from the main campus teaching and running research labs there,” she shared, which provided her a smooth transition into graduate school in the U.S., where she earned both her master’s degree and doctorate at Georgia Tech.
Reflecting on her return to her alma mater, Menon never imagined she’d come back as a faculty member after her postdoc. “Being able to build my own lab and watching my students go through those a-ha moments—it’s been a huge accomplishment,” she said.
As for the future, Menon had clear advice for students wondering if AI might replace traditional engineering: “We need to remind ourselves that AI is not this magical thing by itself. It exists in data centers that require tremendous amounts of energy and cooling,” she said. “ChatGPT is not going to build physical systems. We still need our engineers to be able to do that.”
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