Aries La Riviere

Aries La Riviere

Biography

Aries La Rivière is from Chicago, IL. They graduated from Walter Payton College
Preparatory School in 2024. Aries earned a Merit-Based scholarship to Macalester College,
where they are studying Chemistry, Physics, and Indigenous studies. Aries works for both
the chemistry department as a grader and the theatre department as a costume technician and
designer. Aries is also the president of the Macalester Women and Gender-Inclusive Rugby
Team, where they manage finances and communications. Aries worked as a research intern at
Macalester College under Dr. Keith Kuwata, doing Quantum atmospheric chemical research.
They presented their research on isoprene oxidation at the Midwest Computational Chemistry
Consortium and the ACTC summer symposium in 2025 and again at Minnesota’s NASA
undergraduate symposium in 2026. Aries is expected to graduate in May 2028 with a B.A.
in Chemistry. After graduation, they plan to attend graduate school and complete a PhD in
Marine Chemistry.

Optimizing Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal: The Spiegler-Kedem Model for
Nanofiltration in Oceanic Carbon Sequestration
Aries La Riviere1, Manlin Xu2 and Shuhei Ono2
1Department of Chemistry, Macalester College
2Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology

Effectively mitigating climate change requires both large reductions in human-produced
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and durable, large-scale CO2capture. Nanofiltration (NF), the
filtration of water using membranes with nanoscale pore sizes, allows for size- and chargebased
ion selection. NF has been investigated as a possible way to produce chemically distinct
streams from feed water that could be leveraged for marine-based carbon dioxide removal
(mCDR). Previous experiments have shown promising chemical separations of product water
streams, yet most have been conducted on simple multi-ion solutions or artificial seawater
that inadequately represent the chemistry of some of Earth’s oceans. We report results from
experiments conducted by processing room-temperature artificial seawater through an
NF270 membrane under consistent flow conditions across multiple controlled pressures.
This was used to constrain the Spiegler-Kedem (SK) model to predict the pressures and flow
rates needed for the NF of seawater with any ion concentration. Constraining the reflection
coefficient and solute permeability of NF for major ions as well as major carbonate system
species allows for assessment of NF’s future mCDR potential. Taking us one step closer to NF
being a viable method of global mCDR.