Career
She is the recipient of the 2012 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Award. In January 2015, Deepika was named as one of Forbes" 2015 30 Under 30 in Energy. Deepika Kurup was born in Nashua, New Hampshire.
She has given a number of accounts of what inspired her to work on water purification.
In her entry video to the competition, she explains the mechanism used for developing her invention and also explains some of the factors that led to the invention. This project involved a photocatalytic composite made up of titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, hollow glass microspheres, and Portland cement.
In 2012 Kurup"s photocatalytic composite was able to reduce the amount of total coliform from 8000 colony-forming units to 50. In addition, it oxidised Methylene blue at a faster rate than standard solar disinfection methods.
She improved her method and after 3 years developed a pervious photocatalytic composite using sand, TiO2, Portland cement and silver nitrate.This photocatalytic pervious composite showed 98% reduction in total coliform bacteria immediately after filtration.
Exposure of the filtered water to sunlight with a photocatalytic composite disc resulted in 100% inactivation of total coliform bacteria in just 15 minutes.