The Center for Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology has secured a $15 million grant renewal to continue its research.
Spanning several disciplines and six institutions with its headquarters at Pratt School of Engineering, CEINT will use its renewed endowment—a joint grant from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—to continue studying the potential hazards of small particles on organisms and ecosystems in a rapidly evolving modern world. The five-year-old CIENT has received this grant before, said Jie Liu, a CEINT investigator and George Barth Gellar professor of chemistry.
“It’s a very important task to understand how nanomaterials will impact the environment,” Liu said. “We all know that nanomaterials are becoming more useful in many areas, and how that will impact the environment is not well studied. Duke has a very strong theme to study the environmental impact of these materials.”
The center was founded in 2008 by CEINT Director Mark Wiesner, James L. Meriam professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Deputy Director Gregory Lowry, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, which is part of the center. CIENT has been using top-of-the-line technology to apply basic science research to the study of the environmental implications of nanotechnology, Executive Director Christine Hendren noted.
The center, which explores a variety of interdisciplinary topics, will begin to hone in on the issue of organisms coming in contact with certain nanomaterials and the effect on the environment.
“There’s a lot of work going on about what the hazards are of what nanomaterials might do to organisms and what the possible exposure of nanomaterials might do to organisms in ecosystems,” Wiesner said. “The gap between those two is the area of biouptake—once you’re swimming around in it, will it take it up?”
The center’s focus on the translation of basic science into the research of environmental risk assessment initially won the center its first joint grant from the EPA and NSF at the time of its foundation.
“We have a lot of expertise in complex environmental interactions—we’re looking at an environmentally relevant and realistic scenario,” Hendren said.
CEINT conducts ecological nanomaterials research through the use of its mesocosm facility, which consists of test chambers that can replicate the natural environmental conditions of the wetlands in a controllable, experimental setting.
“In the environment, you start getting factors you don’t actually think about, like sunlight or small bacteria or fungi inside the water,” Liu said. “The mesocosm facility is very important for the center. We’re not just testing in the lab, and the results from the lab and the mesocosm are very different, sometimes the opposite.”
While each research team in the center will continue its individual research project with its allocated grant money, the center as a whole hopes to further explore the various effects and hazards of nanomaterials on the environment in the years to come.
“In the second arch of the funding in the next five years, we’re going to get much more detailed and focused on the complexities involved and get more into what is required to measure concentrations and biouptake,” Hendren said. “We really hope to grow in some of the areas related to this.”
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