Xing Xie
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Clean water and early warning of disease outbreaks both depend on how we handle water and the microbes in it. Chlorine and other chemical disinfectants kill germs, but they can react with organic matter to form toxic byproducts.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Materials Science
- Topics
water disinfection
locally enhanced electric field treatment
electroporation
- Grants
- 4 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Identify how and why nanowire-coated LEEFT electrodes erode under different electrochemical and flow conditions, using SEM with energy dispersive spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.
- Improve LEEFT electrode lifespan by making nanowires from precursor materials that are less acid-soluble or bind more strongly to the substrate, and by adding thin protective coatings.
- Test how well LEEFT-Cu, electric-field treatment combined with germ-killing copper ions, inactivates different microorganisms, and how water temperature and high water conductivity affect its performance.
- Increase copper loading and use in LEEFT-Cu devices to cut replacement frequency and cost, and evaluate scale-up in a pilot test with an industry partner.
- Design and tune porous super-absorbent polymer (PSAP) beads that selectively capture 20–200 nm viruses from wastewater, and study how the beads keep these targets stable without refrigeration.
- Validate PSAP beads against standard sampling methods using ongoing SARS-CoV-2 wastewater surveillance on the Georgia Tech campus, and assess commercial potential through I-Corps customer discovery.
More about the research
Wastewater testing can track infections across a whole community, but samples usually must be refrigerated and processed within a day. That is costly and often impossible in places with few resources. The projects here pursue two lines of work. One develops chemical-free or low-chemical water disinfection based on locally enhanced electric fields. The other develops cheap polymer beads that preserve wastewater samples without refrigeration.
Why it matters
Durable, low-chemical disinfection could give homes, swimming pools, spas and commercial hot-water systems an alternative to chlorine and its harmful byproducts. Refrigeration-free bead sampling could make wastewater monitoring for viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 cheaper and more accurate. This could let communities and health agencies in resource-limited settings with underserved populations track disease spread where cold-chain shipping is not feasible.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
I-Corps: Translation Potential of Point-of-Collection Sample Pretreatment and Preservation with Porous Super-Absorbent Polymer Beads for Wastewater Surveillance
NSF · Sep 2025 – Aug 2027
Investigation on the electrodes applied in the locally enhanced electric field treatment (LEEFT) for water disinfection
NSF · Sep 2022 – Aug 2027
Point-of-Collection Sample Pretreatment and Preservation with Porous Super-Absorbent Polymer (PSAP) Beads for Wastewater Surveillance Testing
NSF · Aug 2023 – Jul 2027
Closest labs
Sossina Haile
Northwestern University, IL·Materials Science
Build multilayer electrode structures in which ultra-thin, proton-permeable barrier layers stop active catalysts such as palladium and silver from reacting with the CsH2PO4 solid acid electrolyte.
Anthony Maurelli
University of Florida, FL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Develop and validate sensitive, specific and reproducible digital PCR methods for detecting Shigella species in wastewater, optimizing extraction using authentic and synthetic wastewater spiked with lab-grown strains.
Jason Nicholas
Michigan State University, MI·Materials Science
Test whether the previously observed shift in the wadsleyite-to-ringwoodite transformation can be reproduced in anhydrous Mg2SiO4 thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition, using diamond anvil cells with synchrotron X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy.
The school
Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.
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