The Sci-Files – 02/09/2020 –Seyed Mohammadreza Heidari- Green Chemistry Nanotechnology
February 10, 2020
On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Seyed Mohammadreza Heidari.
Mohammad is a dual Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Environmental Science and Policy. He has been involved in different research projects related to sustainable nanotechnology, green chemistry, biofuel, and solar energy. His Ph.D. dissertation is about how to synthesize fullerenes with less environmental impacts.
Professor Kroto discovered fullerenes in 1986 and received Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 because of fullerene discovery. Since then, fullerenes have been used in various applications such as cancer therapy, HIV treatment, drug delivery, MRI, electrical sensors, lasers, etc. Since the global market of fullerene is exponentially increasing, quantifying the environmental impacts of existing fullerene production processes is necessary. Mohammad is using green chemistry, life cycle assessment, and ecotoxicity assessment to quantify carbon footprints and mitigate the adverse environmental effects of fullerene production. In another project, he is focusing on generating energy from municipal wastes. In this project, sludge from municipal wastewater treatment plants is used as a source of energy to produce methane in anaerobic digesters.
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Chelsie is a Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. student at Michigan State University. She studies what happens to the extracellular matrix of cells after they have been stressed. She co-hosts "The Sci-Files" with Daniel Puentes. Together they explore the different topics that MSU students research on "The Sci-Files" at WDBM.
Daniel is a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he does research at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. His research involves measuring the mass of radioactive nuclei, and how it can tell us how protons and neutrons are arranged inside of a nucleus. This research also helps scientists understand how the elements were created in different stellar environments! At WDBM, he and Chelsie Boodoo co-host The Sci-Files.
