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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