Pouya Rezai, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering and Computing (CEC), received funding for the project: “Design and Optimization of Imprinted Superabsorbent Polymers for Selective Pathogen Binding and Release: Integrating Materials Science, Fluid Dynamics, and Explainable AI.”
Rezai is collaborating on this project with Hossein Taheri, Associate Professor, Manufacturing Engineering, at Georgia Southern University.
Clean water, safe food, and rapid detection of harmful biological threats are essential to public health, economic stability, and national security. Bacteria and viruses can contaminate water supplies, food systems, and medical spaces, making reliable and durable detection and removal technologies critically important. Many existing methods rely on fragile biological components that are expensive and may fail outside controlled laboratories under real-world conditions, limiting their effectiveness.
The researchers are developing a new class of synthetic materials designed to capture and detect harmful biological targets in a faster, more reliable, and cost-effective manner. These materials combine two key capabilities: they selectively recognize specific biological substances, similar to how a key fits into a lock, and they absorb and transport fluids to increase contact between the target and the material. By integrating these functions into a single platform, the researchers hope to improve the ability to identify and remove harmful substances in complex fluids such as water systems, food processing streams, and medical fluids.
They hope to uncover how these materials interact with biological targets under both still and flowing conditions, leading to improved designs that perform effectively in practical settings.
Rezai and Taheri hold that this research will support advances in water purification, disease monitoring, food safety, and defense, contributing to national priorities in public health, safety, and biotechnology innovation.
Rezai received $450,000 from the National Science Foundation for this project. Funding began in Aug. 2026 and will end in late July 2029.