Gannon Jennings
Vanderbilt University, TN·Engineering
Separating chemical mixtures uses a large amount of energy, more than 5% of the primary energy consumed in the U.S. each year.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Chemistry
- Topics
polymer membranes
pervaporation
solvent dehydration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Identify, synthesize and test new polymer membranes that separate water from polar organic solvents by pervaporation, using ring-opening metathesis polymerization and spin coating.
- Screen candidate membrane chemistries with molecular simulations in the Molecular Simulation and Design Framework (MoSDeF), closely coupled with experimental measurements.
- Build machine learning models in DeepForge, together with a library of membrane properties, that relate polymer chemistry to measured film performance.
- Release general software tools for rapid simulation-based screening and machine learning studies of soft matter systems.
More about the research
Membranes, thin films that let some molecules pass while holding others back, could make these separations far cheaper and more efficient. Designing membranes that can tell apart small, similar molecules such as water and polar solvents is still hard, though, because the possible chemical designs are so numerous. This project aims to speed up membrane discovery by tightly linking computer simulation, machine learning and laboratory experiments, in the spirit of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI).
Why it matters
Better solvent-dehydrating membranes could let manufacturers recover and reuse solvents without costly, energy-intensive distillation-style separations. That could cut energy use and capital costs in chemical production. The released screening software and property library could also speed up design of other polymer materials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jonathan Pokorski
University of California-San Diego, CA·Chemistry
Develop ways to grow polymer chains of norbornene and oxanorbornene directly from cell surfaces using ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP), a catalyst-driven reaction that links ring-shaped building blocks into chains.
Wenyu Huang
Iowa State University, IA·Chemistry
Build a continuous-flow parahydrogen-induced polarization platform that links hydrogenation of carbon-13-labeled precursors, spin-order transfer to create hyperpolarized carbon-13 signals, and membrane-based extraction into water.
Chenfeng Ke
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Chemistry
Construct HCOFs from rigid macrocycles and organic cages with built-in recognition sites to selectively bind molecules of similar size and control solid-state assembly.
The school
Vanderbilt University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 494 research doctorates a year.
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