BY SILVIA CERNEA CLARK
Access to safe drinking water is a major limiting factor to human capacity. And providing access to clean water has the potential to save more lives than doctors, said Pedro Alvarez, Rice’s George R. Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Thanks to decades of research that have culminated in the creation of two vital entities working to make our water safer across the world — the Water Technologies Entrepreneurship and Research (WaTER) Institute that was launched in January 2024 and, now, its new Rice PFAS Alternatives and Remediation Center (R-PARC) — Rice is uniquely positioned to take on these challenges.
“Across the world, we’re seeing more serious contamination by emerging chemical and biological pollutants, and climate change is exacerbating freshwater scarcity with more frequent droughts,” Alvarez said. “The Rice WaTER Institute is expanding research and alliances in the water domain that were built by our NEWT Center, which was very productive in launching startups and training about 200 graduate students to address these water security concerns.”
Alvarez serves as both NEWT director and director of the WaTER Institute. He is joined in his efforts by Michael Wong, Rice’s Tina and Sunit Patel Professor in Molecular Nanotechnology, chair and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and leader of the WaTER Institute’s public health research thrust; and James Tour, Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science and nanoengineering.
Cleaning water is the most important engineering contribution of the 21st century ... but we have not won this war yet.
— Pedro Alvarez
The WaTER Institute boasts a foundation of advancements in clean water technology research and applications, established during the decade-long tenure of the Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) that was funded by the National Science Foundation.
As part of the WaTER Institute, R-PARC will leverage its history of expertise and take full advantage of recent institutional investments, including an array of advanced analytical equipment dedicated to the remediation and removal of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
“We are the leaders in water technologies using nano,” said Wong. “Things that we’ve discovered within the NEWT Center, we’ve already started to realize will be great for real-world applications.”
R-PARC is also the result of multi-year, multimillion-dollar collaborative efforts with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), spearheaded by Tour in 2021 with a graphene synthesis project. It was followed by a series of studies that deployed flash Joule heating (FJH) in a range of applied contexts; the conversion of PFAS-containing firefighter foams and PFAS-contaminated carbons from water purifiers into nontoxic substances; and soil decontamination.
This body of research enabled the development of three spinoff companies, demonstrating the translational capacity and potential for real-world impact catalyzed by the collaboration.
“We’ve had a long-standing collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers, particularly the environmental group there, and we’ve published a number of papers together, including on PFAS destruction and soil remediation,” said Tour. “We hope to expand on this work through this PFAS-dedicated center at Rice.”
Last year witnessed a major shift in the U.S. regulatory landscape when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued unprecedentedly stringent limits on the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS as a way to tackle drinking water contamination.
“More than 200 million Americans could have PFAS in their tap water, and for decades Americans have been exposed to toxic ‘forever chemicals’ with no oversight from their government,” said Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook when the limits were announced in April 2024.
The EPA’s new limits set the maximum contaminant level at 4 parts per trillion for two of the most common PFAS — among the most protective health limits on PFAS in drinking water worldwide.
“For reference, that represents four drops in 1,000 Olympic pools, such a low concentration that it is very difficult to measure and even more difficult to attain,” said Alvarez. “Meeting these new standards will not be possible without technological innovation both in terms of mitigation and sustainable alternatives.”
R-PARC will bring together top researchers, industry leaders, policy experts and entrepreneurs to foster collaboration and accelerate the development of innovative solutions to several PFAS challenges, including comprehensive PFAS characterization and risk assessment; contaminated site remediation; wastewater treatment infrastructure upgrades; and the development of non-PFAS materials and products.
“The challenge of PFAS cuts across several of the four major research trajectories that define Rice’s strategic vision,” said Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Rice’s executive vice president for research and professor of materials science and nanoengineering and physics and astronomy. “R-PARC will help focus and amplify ongoing work on PFAS remediation at Rice.”
Rice unveiled R-PARC last summer during a visit to campus by an ERDC delegation led by agency director David Pittman, who also serves as the director of research and development and chief scientist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).
“The sky’s the limit,” Pittman said of the growing partnership between Rice and USACE. “There’s a lot more work out there to be done, and you help our nation by helping us do what we do.”
PFAS decontamination and replacement will require sustained, long-term effort... R-PARC will serve as a gathering point for discovery and innovation and as a training ground for the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs.
— Michael Wong
In addition to underscoring the potential for an enhanced collaboration on research in national security priority areas, the ERDC visit also reinforced the need for an expanded partnership between Rice and ERDC.
“PFAS decontamination and replacement will require sustained, long-term effort,” Wong said. “We need better ways to detect and identify PFAS compounds, we need sustainable ways to break down PFAS like photocatalysis technology, for example, and we need to design non-PFAS that can replace PFAS in products. R-PARC will serve as a gathering point for discovery and innovation and as a training ground for the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs.”
And as the demand for clean, safe drinking water continues to rapidly increase across the world, the WaTER Institute will keep working toward the rapid deployment of technologies designed to make sure the whole world has access to the water it needs.
“Cleaning water is the most important engineering contribution of the 21st century, in the sense that it is largely responsible for increasing life expectancy of Americans at birth from 47 in the year 1900 to 78 today,” Alvarez added. “But we have not won this war yet. We still have 43 million Americans who don’t have access to clean, reliable water from municipal systems. Our water infrastructure is unable to meet the growing challenges of treating emerging pollutants. We can do a lot better, and technology can be a very important part of that solution.”