CBE faculty take the lead in high-impact Research Forward initiatives

CBE faculty are leading two 2025 Research Forward initiatives selected by The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The program, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), provides 1 to 2 years of project funding for collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-investigator research projects that are high-risk, high-impact, and transformative.

Ernest Micek Distinguished Chair, James A. Dumesic Professor, and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor Manos Mavrikakis is the principal investigator for a project titled “Designing sustainable materials and chemistries for the hydrogen economy.”

Hydrogen (H2) is an energy carrier that can power our electricity grid, transportation, and chemical industry, supporting society’s growing need for clean energy. However, currently employed materials for the Hydrogen Economy in (electro)chemical conversion devices— electrolyzers that split water to produce hydrogen, liquid carriers that store hydrogen, and fuel cells that convert hydrogen back to electricity—are derived from unsustainable sources including critical minerals and carbon sources, hindering their scalability and environmental benefits.

This project will develop the science and engineering foundations to co-design materials for both performance and sustainability, utilizing inexpensive, earth-abundant metals and carbon sources from abundant biomass feedstocks.

Co-principal investigators include Duane H. and Dorothy M. Bluemke Assistant Professor Siddarth Krishna and Conway Assistant Professor Whitney Loo, both CBE faculty, as well as Luca Mastropasqua, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

Co-investigators include Duane H. and Dorothy M. Bluemke Assistant Professor in CBE Styliana Avraamidou, Sage Kokjohn, the Phil and Jean Myers Professor of mechanical engineering, Mohan Qin, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Kyoung-Shin Choi, professor of chemistry.

Duane H. and Dorothy M. Bluemke Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor David Lynn is principal investigator on a project titled “Exploiting the unseen to identify the unknown: Machine learning-assisted platforms for the detection of toxic ‘forever chemicals’ (PFAS) in water.”

Identifying toxic agents is important in all areas of our society, from ensuring the quality of drinking water and food supplies to the detection of disease. Systems that can reliably report such threats and be adapted to detect new emerging threats would address many important grand challenges. This project will develop portable chip-based systems that can be interpreted using machine learning to detect toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” important in environmental and manufacturing contexts.

The research team will blend machine learning-assisted computation and experimental methods to exploit the properties of liquid crystalline materials to enable rapid, inexpensive, and portable detection of PFAS in water at vanishingly low levels relevant in U.S. regulatory contexts. This approach can also advance strategies for the sensitive and selective identification of other important analytes.

Co-investigators for the project include Norman C. Craig Professor of Chemistry Helen Blackwell, Christy Remucal, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, Hunt-Hougen Associate Professor Reid Van Lehn, and Baldovin-DaPra Professor Victor Zavala, both in CBE.