The Cates Lab has a received an internal grant from the College of Engineering, Computing, and Applied Science at Clemson to pursue our work on advancement of UVC devices for prevention of opportunistic pathogens in premise plumbing. The grant will fund Hamed Torkzadeh’s work in biofilm inhibition by UVC using instruments at the Clemson Light Imagining Facility.

Dr. Cates contributed to a perspective on article titled “The technology horizon for photocatalytic water treatment: Sunrise or sunset?”, which was coauthored by numerous leading experts in physicochemical water treatment.

See the article here

See the article here

Nature Nanotechnology article

ES&T Letters article

The group welcomes Dr. Dawei Wang as a new postdoctoral research associate. Dr. Wang received his PhD from Hohai University and U. California Riverside in 2016, and recently completed a postdoc fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University. He will use his extensive experience in nanomaterial synthesis and environmental technology to pursue new directions in our focus on photocatalytic technologies for degradation of perfluoroalkyl water contaminants.

We are excited to announcement an award of funding the the Department of Defense –  Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program.  The project is titled “Pilot scale assessment of a deployable photocatalytic treatment system modified with bismuth phosphate catalyst particles for PFAS destruction in investigation-derived wastewaters.” A Purifics Photo-cat pilot system will be modified with catalysts developed in the Cates Lab and the system will be tested for treatment efficiency using groundwater samples from DoD airfield sites. Photocatalytic degradation of poly/perfluoroalkyl substances and other organic contaminants will be monitored, and related to influent water parameters. The project, led by Clemson, will be conducted in collaboration with Battelle, Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Georgia Tech, and Purifics Water Inc.

In collaboration with Jaehong Kim and group members at Yale University, Sushant Sahu and Ezra Cates recently published experiments debunking the decade-old concept of visible-to-ultraviolet upconversion sensitized photocatalysis.  Read the abstract here:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b05941

As part of North Carolina State University’s Environmental, Water Resources, and Coastal Engineering graduate seminar series, Dr. Cates gave a talk on radiation-based processes and materials for advanced water treatment technologies.

Brandy is a junior microbiology major at Clemson, and will serve as an undergraduate lab assistant in micro-related tasks.