Karen Winey: $2.2 Million Grant from the U.S. Department of Energy

With bans on the chemical being proposed in the U.S. and around the world, the challenge now is creating fluorine-free polymer membranes that do the same job. Karen Winey, the Harold Pender Professor in the departments of chemical & biomolecular engineering and materials science & engineering, has already started to address this challenge by using fluorine-free polymers with precisely placed sulfonate groups. When these proton exchange membranes (PEMs) come into contact with water, the sulfonate groups assemble to form intricate water channels for protons to flow through.