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Student helps turn water into wine

18 March 2009

Kim Mosse

Monash science PhD candidate Kim Mosse has won a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship and will spend nine months at the University of California, Davis, looking at water recycling at wineries.

Ms Mosse is enrolled at the School of Applied Sciences and Engineering at the Gippsland campus but conducts her research at the Clayton campus through the Centre for Green Chemistry and the School of Biological Sciences.

The prestigious Fulbright program is the largest educational scholarship of its kind, created by US Senator J William Fulbright and the US Government in 1946.

The Fulbright aims to promote mutual understanding through educational exchange and operates between the US and 150 countries.

Ms Mosse's research will examine the impacts of using winery wastewater on soil and plant health in Californian wine-growing regions.

"In these days of water shortages the ability to reuse winery wastewater for irrigation would be of significant benefit to wine grape growers," Ms Mosse said.

She said the Californian and Australian wine industries faced water shortage as a major problem.

"There are many issues associated with such a practice due to the variability in wastewater composition, different treatment practices, and the risk of causing long term damage to the soil and plant ecosystem.

"I will use a variety of cutting edge molecular biological techniques to assess the effects that winery wastewater application has on soil microbial populations."

Ms Mosse said she had two key reasons for wanting to study in the US.

"The research group that I want to join at Davis at Sacramento has significant experience in both soil ecology and vineyard management," Ms Mosse said.

"It will be highly valuable to work with the US industry and to perform studies and compare results to those done in Australia."

Ms Mosse completed a Bachelor of Science at the Gippsland campus and has won various awards and scholarships including the Sir John Monash Award, a Baden-Württemberg Stipendium (German state government scholarship, 2005) and the Australian Society for Microbiology Prize.

For more information on the scholarship visit the Fulbright website.