Designing Material Interfaces to Deliver Clean Water

Join the Department of Chemistry for this Chemistry Colloquium featuring guest speaker Seth Darling, who serves as both interim chief science and technology officer at the Energy and Global Security Directorate and as director of the Advanced Materials for Energy-Water Systems (AMEWS) Center at Argonne National Laboratory.

Driven by climate change, population growth, development, urbanization, and other factors, water crises represent one of the greatest global risks in the coming decades. Advances in materials represent a powerful tool to address many of these challenges. Understanding and ultimately controlling interfaces between materials and water are pivotal. In this presentation, Darling will lay out the challenges and present several examples of work in his group based on materials engineering strategies for addressing applications in water. In each instance, manipulation of interfacial properties provides novel functionality, ranging from selective transport to energy transduction to pollution mitigation.