Thanks to a National Science Foundation grant (OIS 0530174), we are pursuing research on water purification in collaboration with the group of Anatoliy Burban at the Kiev Mohyla Academy in Ukraine and the group of Pierre Aimar at Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France. Thus far, the collaboration has involved 3 week visits by graduate students and undergraduate students to both Toulouse and Kiev. Students are working on antibacterial polyelectrolyte membranes loaded with Ag nanoparticles and modification of hollow fiber membranes with multilayer polyelectrolyte films. Volodomyr Tarabara, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is the lead investigator on the international grant.