Advanced Polymers for Water Purification Applications

Need for access to clean water is one of the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century and a critical challenge for South Africa. This project will stimulate collaborative STEM research in pursuit of addressing this challenge by supporting an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers at UVA and researchers at Stellenbosch University. This collaboration, which leverages chemistry expertise in South Africa and engineering expertise at UVA, aims to prepare and characterize new polymers that will provide insight into the molecular mechanisms that ultimately inform desalination membrane performance.