Mark your calendars for February 27 - 28, 2025, as Georgia Tech's Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) hosts the 2025 Sustainability Showcase. This two-day event, held at the Price Gilbert Library Scholars Event Theater, will focus on innovation, collaboration, and inspiration around building a resilient future for our communities, ecosystems, and infrastructure.
Researchers, faculty, students, staff, and partners will explore how we can boost our resilience in the face of a rapidly changing world. With a full agenda featuring lightning talks, panel discussions, and a visioning “Unconference,” attendees will have ample opportunity to engage with cutting-edge research and innovative initiatives.
Event Highlights:
Don't miss this opportunity to be part of this annual event and connect with the sustainability community. Whether you're a faculty member or a curious student, whether you can attend a whole day or just one session, the Sustainability Showcase offers something for everyone. Join us and be inspired by the breadth and depth of sustainability work happening at Georgia Tech.
For more information, visit the Sustainability Showcase website.
Brent Verrill, Research Communications Program Manager, BBISS
L to R, Top to Bottom: Ebenezer Fanijo, Katherine Graham, Anthony Harding, Yiyi He, Pengfei Liu, Johannes Milz, Micah Ziegler
Seven new Faculty Fellows were appointed to the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS). In addition to their own work, BBISS Fellows serve as a board of advisors to the BBISS; foster the culture and community of sustainability researchers, educators, and students at Georgia Tech; and communicate broadly the vision, mission, values, and objectives of the BBISS. Fellows will work with the BBISS for three years, with the potential for a renewed term.
The BBISS Faculty Fellows program has been in place since 2014. Fellows are drawn from across all seven Georgia Tech Colleges and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). BBISS Interim Executive Director Beril Toktay says, "The Fellows' wide-ranging expertise and varied academic paths create exciting opportunities for new partnerships and deeper connections across our sustainability network." The new BBISS Faculty Fellows are:
These faculty members will join the current roster of BBISS Faculty Fellows.
Brent Verrill, Research Communications Program Manager, BBISS
Learn how to use Dimensions AI to further your research and develop impactful literature reviews.
Presented by:
Yongsheng Chen, Bonnie W. and Charles W. Moorman IV Professor in environmental engineering at Georgia Tech
Someday, your drinking water could be completely free of toxic “forever chemicals.”
These chemicals, called PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), are found in common household items like makeup, nonstick cookware, dental floss, batteries, and food packaging. PFAS permeate the soil, water, food, and air, and they can remain in the environment for millennia. Once inside the human body, PFAS can persist for years, suppressing the immune system and increasing cancer risk.
Georgia Tech researchers, armed with a cutting-edge machine learning (ML) model, are spearheading a multi-university initiative. Their goal? To design a better membrane that efficiently removes PFAS from drinking water, a significant source of human exposure.
“More than 200 million Americans in all 50 states are affected by PFAS in drinking water, with 1,400 communities having levels above health experts’ safety thresholds,” noted the study’s principal investigator Yongsheng Chen, Bonnie W. and Charles W. Moorman IV Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Chen also directs the Nutrients, Energy, and Water Center for Agriculture Technology, or NEW Center. “Our research aims to provide a scalable, efficient, and sustainable solution for mitigating these toxic chemicals’ impact on human health and the environment.”
The resulting work, funded with over $10 million in multiyear grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Science Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was recently published in Nature Communications.
Sewage Treatment Limitations
Conventional water treatment processes are ineffective at removing PFAS. Too often, traditional cleansing methods, such as using chlorine to kill pathogens in water, create harmful byproducts.
“Solving one problem creates another problem,” said Chen.
He has already used ML and artificial intelligence in precision agriculture to monitor nutrient levels in plants and insists that tackling PFAS removal similarly requires new approaches. Rather than treating an entire body of water, Chen’s team first separated PFAS from the water stream. Success depended on finding the right membrane material to isolate the chemicals in the water.
Chen relied on a team of 10 Ph.D. students and nine research scientists to perform the ML modeling. In addition to Georgia Tech, two other schools contributed people and laboratory expertise. The University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) validated the model with molecular simulations, while Arizona State University (ASU) trained it using data from scientific literature and their lab.
“Applying machine learning to membrane separation represents an exciting frontier for environmental engineering,” said Tiezheng Tong, an associate professor of environmental engineering in ASU’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment.
This is another step in tackling PFAS pollution, a widespread problem that has recently received significant public attention due to PFAS’ toxic nature and the recent EPA ruling on PFAS in drinking water, he said.
“By integrating with molecular simulation tools, we can better understand PFAS transport across nanofiltration and reverse osmosis membranes, pushing the boundary of fundamental science relating to membrane separation,” Tong said.
ML Accelerates Membrane-Material Discoveries
Using ML modeling significantly sped up the discovery process. For instance, one Ph.D. student in Chen’s lab used trial and error over two years to pinpoint one promising membrane. Machine learning modeling allowed the team to find eight membrane candidates 10 to 20 times faster, reducing discovery time from years to a few months.
“Our molecular dynamics simulations reveal that electrostatic interactions, size exclusion, and dehydration play critical roles in governing the transport of PFAS molecules across polyamide membranes,” Ying Li explained. Li is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at UWM. “These calculations indicate that electrostatic interactions dominate PFAS rejection, with charged functional groups significantly influencing transport behavior. The simulation results provide fundamental insights that align with ML predictions, highlighting the key molecular determinants of PFAS removal efficiency.”
Addressing PFAS Exposure in Agriculture
By addressing PFAS contamination, this research could also benefit the agriculture industry, which depends on fertilizer sourced from water treatment plants. Wastewater biosolids are processed into fertilizer, offering farmers and ranchers a cheaper alternative to chemical fertilizers. Unfortunately, PFAS-tainted fertilizers from sewage sludge have contaminated significant amounts of land and livestock. Industry groups estimate that almost 70 million acres of U.S. farmland could be contaminated by these forever chemicals.
By funding this research, the USDA hopes that an effective membrane will help the United States reclaim this crucial resource.
“Synthesizing a very smart membrane to get rid of PFAS also allows us to recover the fertilizer from municipal wastewater treatment plants,” Chen said. “Such a membrane could enable us to get rid of things we don’t want and keep the things we need, so we can keep the water for irrigation or other applications.”
Eliminating PFAS in fertilizers also could help address the mismatch of food and water demand in urban versus rural areas since 80% of the demand resides in cities. PFAS removal could directly support urban area resource recovery and food production.
“Our goal is achieving a circular economy where materials never become waste, and nature is regenerated,” Chen said.
What’s Next
The team will fine-tune the model and add more data to improve its training features. Chen will synthesize membranes in his lab to further test the model's PFAS removal predictions.
Today, scientists have found ways to remove long chains of PFAS, but the shorter chains of these chemicals persist, explained Chen.
“If we can better understand the mechanism, we’ll be able to design a good material membrane to get rid of all PFAS. That could be game-changing.”
— By Anne Wainscott-Sargent
Funding
This work is partially supported by the NSF (Award Nos. 2112533, 2427299, 2345543, Y.C.; 2448130, T.T.; and 2345542, Y.L.).
Y.C. acknowledges the financial support by the USDA (Award No.2018−68011-28371), NSF-USDA (Award No. 2020-67021-31526), and EPA (Award No. 840080010).
T.T. acknowledges the support of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (Hatch Project COL00799, accession 1022591).
Y.L. acknowledges the financial support by the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), funded by the US DOE, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Advanced Manufacturing Office, under Funding Opportunity announcement Number DE-FOA-0001905, through a subcontract to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ying Li, associate professor of mechanical engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Tiezheng Tong, associate professor of environmental engineering at Arizona State University
Shelley Wunder-Smith | Director of Research Communications
shelley.wunder-smith@research.gatech.edu
Join us for a special screening of "Navigating Autism in Communities of Color," followed by an exclusive panel discussion with Producer Jennifer Singh, Director John Thornton, and members of the cast.
Join us for a panel and conversation (with a reception to follow) as we celebrate Earth Day 2025. Registration is free.
Members of the Georgia Tech community are excited to welcome the community back to campus for the kickoff event of the 12th annual Atlanta Science Festival. Formerly known as Georgia Tech Science and Engineering Day, Celebrate STEAM will feature hands on activities for participants of all ages. Whether your interests lie in robotics, brains, biology, space, art, nanotechnology, paper, computer science, wearables, bioengineering, chemical engineering, or systems engineering, we have something for everyone.