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YanFei Tang

Education: Ph.D. ’22, Tongji University
Cornell Advisor: April Gu, Civil and Environmental Engineering
EDF Advisor: Joe Rudek

YanFei Tang is a 2024 EDF-Cornell Atkinson Joint Postdoc. Her research primarily focuses on nitrogen resource recovery and upcycling during wastewater and biosolids treatment, as well as the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. YanFei (Anny) excels in identifying and regulating the synthesis of plant-growth biostimulants, including aromatic amino acids, their derived phytohormones, and their self-assembly products. Her work also emphasizes carbon footprint-reducing biological technologies by establishing an extracellular electron transfer (EET) pathway to facilitate carbon and nitrogen redirection during wastewater and sewage sludge treatments.  She possesses extensive expertise in analyzing cellular bioelectrochemical status, chromatography mass spectrometry, metagenomics, and metatranscriptomics, all of which support her efforts to develop novel strategies for biosynthesis and contribute to the advancement of a circular economy. 

Innovative Nutrients Biomining From Agricultural Wastes Coupled with GHGs-Methane-N2O Mitigation

This project aims to develop a sustainable biotechnology for nutrient recycling from livestock manures to enable a circular economy and mitigate climate impacts. Anaerobic digestion is a process whereby microorganisms break down biodegradable materials, and climate-warming methane-containing biogas can be captured and reused. However, the leftover effluent from anaerobic digestion is high in nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen, which can pollute waterways. Researchers aim to demonstrate an innovative biotechnology that can simultaneously mitigate greenhouse gas emissions while upcycling methane, phosphorus and nitrogen into more-sustainable fertilizers.