(6ij) High Performance Polymers for Water Purification and Energy Storage/Generation Applications: Rational Design Guided By Fundamental Structure/Property Relations

My research interests are in the broad area of polymer science and engineering. More specifically, I am interested in designing functional polymeric materials (e.g., membranes and adsorbents) for water treatment and energy storage/generation applications, with a particular emphasis on improving the fundamental understanding of solute transport in dense and porous polymers. The research in my group will strive to marry the fields of chemical engineering, chemistry, and materials science to tackle some of the biggest technological problems facing society today. A primary focus of my future research program will be to establish general guidelines for rationally controlling polymer structure (both physical and chemical) to achieve a desired set of transport properties for solutes of practical interest. Such structure/property rules will be generated via a combined experimental and theoretical approach involving advanced polymer synthesis and characterization techniques, as well as theoretical modeling of solute transport through polymers. This fundamental knowledge will be leveraged to develop functional polymers that exhibit radical improvements in performance over existing state-of-the-art materials, potentially revolutionizing current industrial separations practices.

One grand challenge facing society today is water scarcity. Increasing global demand for clean water, driven by population growth, agricultural expansion, and climate change, among other reasons, coupled with depleting freshwater resources pose a major technological challenge to humanity. Moreover, the inherent connection between water availability and energy production further exacerbates this issue. Treatment of non-conventional water resources (e.g., seawater and wastewater) will be critical for meeting global water demands. Currently, membrane and adsorbent-based technologies are most widely implemented for water treatment applications due to their energy efficiency, small footprint, and operational simplicity. However, current state-of-the-art materials are plagued by a number of issues, including poor stability and inadequate selectivity for certain solutes, and are ill-equipped to handle treatment of non-conventional water sources (e.g., flowback water from fracking, brines, etc.) and waters containing more specialized contaminants (e.g., pharmaceuticals, organics). My research group will seek to address these issues by developing novel polymer membranes, as well as composite membranes, that are specifically designed to treat unconventional waters containing unique contaminants in an energy efficient and cost-effective manner. Design of such materials will be guided by fundamental knowledge of the relationship between polymer structure and solute transport properties.

Polymer membranes are also utilized as solid electrolytes in energy storage/generation applications such as fuel cells and batteries. Membranes for these applications must selectively permeate certain ionic species (e.g., lithium ions in lithium ion batteries or hydrogen ions in hydrogen fuel cells) while simultaneously hindering permeation of others. Although some of these technologies have been successfully commercialized, they still suffer from severe shortcomings, for example safety issues in lithium ion batteries due to use of flammable solvents, slow charge/discharge rates, etc. One avenue to mitigate (or eliminate) these issues and improve the overall performance of these technologies is to design better membranes, an endeavor that could be facilitated by a molecular understanding of the dominant factors governing solute transport in such materials and how polymer structure can be tuned to control solute transport properties. However, such fundamental understanding is scarce in the open literature. My research group will be well-equipped to fill in these basic scientific knowledge gaps by extending the synthesis, characterization, and modeling techniques developed for water-purification membranes to systems relevant for fuel cells and batteries (e.g., lithium ion batteries, redox flow batteries, aqueous batteries, etc.).

Postdoctoral Project: “Synthesis of functionalized porous aromatic frameworks for rapid and selective removal of contaminants (e.g., boron) from aqueous solutions.”

Under supervision of Jeffrey R. Long, Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley

Ph.D. Dissertation: “Ion sorption and transport in ion exchange membranes: importance of counter-ion condensation.”

Under supervision of Benny D. Freeman and Donald R. Paul, McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin

Research Experience:

I was first exposed to scientific research during the summer following my sophomore year in high school when I participated in a high school intern program at Columbia University Medical Center in an organic chemistry laboratory. Since then, my scientific curiosity has led me to a number of different research groups, exposing me to different research areas. During my undergraduate studies, I spent one summer in a biomedical engineering laboratory at Columbia University performing research in the area of nanobiotechnology. Later, I joined a materials science research group in the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory where I performed research on organic/inorganic hybrid solar cells and nanoscale metal oxide patterning. As an NSF graduate research fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UT Austin, my project focused on improving the fundamental understanding of ion and water transport in ion containing polymers. The project was largely experimental in nature, involving the synthesis and characterization of polymer membranes, but it also involved a theoretical component. Notably, I developed a unifying theoretical framework for describing, and in some cases predicting with no adjustable parameters, ion partitioning and transport in ion containing polymers. I am currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, and my research project involves the synthesis and characterization of functionalized porous aromatic frameworks for use as high performance adsorbents for water treatment applications, specifically boron capture from water. This diverse research experience motivates me to establish and lead a highly collaborative and multidisciplinary research program that exists at the interface of chemical engineering, chemistry, and materials science.

Teaching Interests:

I developed a passion for teaching when I served as an undergraduate teaching assistant for a Linear Algebra course during my undergraduate studies at Stony Brook University. I found the experience to be exciting, challenging, and extremely rewarding, so I signed up to be a teaching assistant for a Multivariable Calculus course the next semester. During my Ph.D. studies, I was a graduate teaching assistant for two undergraduate level courses, Introduction to Chemical Engineering Analysis and Thermodynamics, and one graduate level course, Polymer Science. My responsibilities as a teaching assistant varied from designing homework and exam problems to lecturing large classes, and my passion for teaching has grown more with each experience. As a faculty member, I am interested in teaching core chemical engineering courses such as Thermodynamics, Transport Phenomena, and Reaction Kinetics, as well as more specialized courses such in polymer science and materials chemistry. I am also excited to develop specialized graduate level courses in areas related to my research (e.g., mass transfer in polymeric materials). As a chemical engineer by training, however, I would be delighted to teach any other courses depending upon departmental needs.

In addition to teaching, I have extensive experience mentoring a number of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students from various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. As a faculty member, I will make it a priority to build a diverse research group, as I strongly believe that a diverse way of thinking is necessary to solve some of the greatest problems facing humanity today. I will also strive to form strong relationships with both local and national high schools and develop research programs for high school students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds who otherwise may not be exposed to scientific research, since I strongly believe that early exposure to scientific research plays an instrumental role in pursuing a career in the STEM fields, as it did for me.