Chemistry prof’s research featured on European journal cover
By Elena Hines
College of Arts and Sciences staff writer
Western Michigan University chemistry professor Dr. Gellert Mezei has had his research not only published in “Chemistry: A European Journal” but also highlighted on its front cover in the April 11, 2016 issue.
In 2000, he was part of the discovery of “nanojars,” compounds two nanometers wide that have a cavity inside and look like a jar.
“Within the cavity, they can encapsulate ions, including some toxic ions,” Mezei said. “We can use the compounds to sequester toxic ions from water—maybe we could use them to purify water.”
Mezei’s team has shown that nanojars can reduce levels of arsenic and chromate from water to those acceptable to the Environmental Protection Agency.
At this point, everything is on a fundamental chemistry level; no procedure is in place to do this on a large scale.
“It could be applied, but that requires years of work,” he said.
The molecules were originally discovered serendipitously, he said. Once they were discovered, Mezei studied their structural properties and then rationally designed experiments that led to a wealth of new results.
The project lay dormant for almost 10 years, but Mezei revived it a few years ago and in 2014 received a grant in the amount of $284,833 from the National Science Foundation entitled “Selective, high efficiency anion encapsulation by neutral nanojars.” Graduate and undergraduate students, even high schoolers who worked over summers paid by the American Chemical Society’s Project SEED (for economically disadvantaged high school students), contributed to the research.
After more study on the new class of molecules, he has a patent filed on the project.
In addition to publication of his work in “Chemistry: A European Journal,” more results have been published in two papers in the prestigious journal “Chemical Communications,” and another cover story in “Dalton Transactions,” a peer-reviewed journal published weekly by the Royal Society of Chemistry, has gone to press.
And just recently, he received an email from a former undergraduate student who works in a metal plating factory whose wastewater includes chromate. The student is going to collect samples, with the hopes of furthering the research efforts.
“Eventually we’ll try to commercialize the process,” Mezei said.