CORNERSTONE Young Professionals: Priscilla Arthur

Developing new water treatment technologies, optimising smart monitoring tools or validating the sustainability of solutions: In CORNERSTONE, many young professionals are doing their part to achieve the goals of the project. One thing they all have in common: They are highly motivated and passionate about their work. One of our "CORNERSTONE Young Professionals" is Priscilla Arthur. She is a Digital Innovation Project Manager at i2M, a MANN+HUMMEL company. Her focus is on the integration of sensor data into othe STREAMETRIC platform, enabling real-time monitoring, data analysis, and process optimization and predictive maintenance for novel membrane technologies. Read more about Priscilla and her work in the interview!

What is your motivation and what excites you the most about your work? 

What motivates me most is contributing to circular economy solutions that can work in real industrial settings. I am especially interested in how AI and digital tools can help us make better use of data that already exists or is being collected from sensors. In CORNERSTONE, I value the chance to test smart monitoring concepts in real environments and see how they can support more reliable, efficient, and sustainable water treatment. 

Which impact do you think your research will have on the future?

I hope my work helps make smart solutions more practical and useful for industrial water treatment. Today, many processes still depend on reacting to problems once they happen. With better sensor data and smart monitoring, we can start spotting issues earlier and make more confident decisions. What I like about CORNERSTONE is that we are not just discussing digital solutions in theory; we are testing them in real industrial environments. For me, the goal is to show that AI and digital tools can create real value: more stable processes, better use of energy and resources, and a stronger contribution to circular economy goals.

What opportunities does the research project CORNERSTONE offer you as a young researcher in your early career? 

CORNERSTONE gives me the opportunity to contribute to a Horizon Europe project with 16 partner institutions working across Europe. For an early-career professional, that is a great environment to learn, exchange ideas, and see how different experts approach the same challenge from different angles. I also value that the project connects research with real industrial conditions, giving me the chance to work on solutions that could influence how we approach circular industrial water treatment.

What is the best thing about your job as a scientist in the CORNERSTONE project? 

The best part is working across different processes and seeing how each one has its own challenges, data situation, and implications for smart monitoring. I also enjoy the practical questions behind the work: Which sensors are available? Is the data continuous? Can we trust it? There is no single ready-made model or algorithm that fits everything, so a lot of the work is about experimenting, validating, and finding what works best. Being able to do this with experts from different fields is a great learning experience.

Find Priscilla on LinkdIn!