The key to a successful academic career is to have great students and strong, consistent funding.  The key to a long and successful academic career is to reinvent oneself along the way, which means having rich intellectual collaborations.  My own work is characterized by deep connections to fundamental chemistry and nanoscience, but also analytical chemistry and applied ecology.  I have long studied radiation-induced transformations of chemicals, but gradually shifted my focus from reductive dechlorination and advanced oxidation to understanding the basis of catalytic activity, which then led to the design, synthesis and characterization of photoactive materials for energy applications, such as CO2 conversion.  I have also studied chemical interactions in ecological systems to better understand structure/function relationships in benthic systems.  Recently, I have turned, and in some cases returned, to the questions surrounding the design of truly sustainable cities.  The challenge of this endeavor is to integrate the urban metabolism with that of nature and to find appropriate uses for technology.  In this talk I will discuss the arc of my career in environmental chemistry, which began with drinking water treatment technologies and is returning to that topic, but at a completely different scale.

From water quality to nanotechnology to cities:  Details and people matter

248th National Meeting (2014)

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