From Water Purification to Food - My Nanomaterials Journey to Sustainability

Current farming practices create a broken nutrient loop, where most nutrients are lost into our environment or left behind in agriculture residues, and animal and food waste, creating multiple pollution problems. In this talk, we demonstrate a new approach that can close the nutrient cycle using zero-waste nitro-oxidation processing (NOP) technologies, capable of rapidly upcycling natural organic waste into reproducible, sustainable, and safe fertilizers, growing media, soil amendments and biogels for farming. In brief, NOP can extract all nutrients (nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), macro- and micro-nutrients) from organic feedstocks in a few hours, neutralizing the effluent into safe and effective fertilizers, sterilizing all harmful human pathogens, while producing no odor nor greenhouse gases. Furthermore, NOP can prepare anionic nanocellulose scaffold that can be ionically cross-linked into stable but biodegradable biogels using essential metal ions (macro- and micronutrient) for plant growth. These NOP-derived biogels can be used as effective additives to improve the water hold capacity of fibrous substrates and soils, standalone growing media, or water remediation materials.

Dr. Benjamin S. Hsiao

Dr. Benjamin S. Hsiao received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from National Taiwan University, his Ph.D. in Materials Science from University of Connecticut, and did post-doctoral training in polymer science & engineering at the University of Massachusetts. After his postdoctoral work, he joined DuPont Company as a staff scientist and spent eight years in R&D before coming to Stony Brook University. He served as Chair of the Chemistry Department and Vice President for Research at SBU. Currently, Hsiao is a Distinguished Professor in Chemistry. 

Dr. Hsiao has achieved national and international prominence in polymer science. He has published over 656 peer-reviewed scientific papers, reviews and book chapters, obtained 62 issued patents with 26 pending patent applications, and edited 2 books. He was elected as a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS), a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He was a AAAS-Lemelson Foundation Invention Ambassador, and received the DuPont Young Faculty Award, a SUNY Distinguished Professorship, a Chang-Jiang Chair Professorship in China, ACS Cooperative Research Award, NSF Special Creativity Award, and The Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water - The Creativity Prize.

His current research interests are focused on the development of sustainable materials from underutilized biomass for food and water security. Specifically, Dr. Hsiao and his team have invented a simple Nitro-Oxidation Process - zero-waste technology that can rapidly convert natural organic waste (e.g., food waste, animal waste, and agriculture waste) into safe nutrients and growing media for farming and remediation materials for water purification.

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