University of Georgia Professor Qingguo “Jack” Huang always wanted to do one thing: solve problems.
Growing up in a small city in central China, Huang’s favorite subject in elementary school was math, granting him the opportunity to work on many problems. In high school, his passion transitioned to science, where he learned he could feed those same interests in a way that benefited others.
He was finishing high school in the 1980s when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring made its way to Chinese newspapers, capturing Huang’s attention.
Carson was a marine biologist whose book, published in 1962, was credited with advancing marine conservation and the global environmental movement. It documented environmental harm caused by the indiscriminate use of the pesticide DDT during World War 2.
“We didn’t have access to the whole book,” Huang said, “but there was a small piece talking about how environmental pollution can be harmful to people and how important it is to protect the environment.”
His concern for those issues—combined with an interest in chemistry—led Huang to select environmental chemistry as his undergraduate major in China and then to pursue a doctorate in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan. By the time he was engaged in postdoctoral work, Huang was still contemplating the types of real-world problems he wanted to solve.
“I started to think: What are the questions that I want to work on?” said Huang, a professor in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “I heard about these chemicals, PFAS. Back then, outside of environmental scientists, it was not as well-known as it is now.”
PFAS (short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a group of human-made chemicals used in many consumer and industrial products due to their resistance to oil and water and their ability to withstand hot temperatures. PFAS are present in many products including clothing, carpets, cookware, and especially firefighting foam.
They are the most persistent of human-made chemicals. Over time, researchers have concluded that they could enter the human body.
PFAS were made with the purpose of being very stable and resistant to degradation; they don’t break down in nature, instead accumulating over time, seeping into the food chain and then gathering in humans and other species. They are now overtly present in water, soil, and air, with no innate way to degrade, warranting their nickname of “forever chemicals.”
“They’re carcinogenic. Eventually they end up in a landfill. After tens of years in a landfill, they slowly leach out and find their way into the landfill leachate and the environment,” Huang said. “The problem is our technologies. Traditional technologies don’t remove those chemicals. As a chemist, it’s intriguing to me if we can devise a way to degrade them. It’s a challenging question.”
Quantifying PFAS at low concentrations requires special advanced equipment. UGA had the necessary tools and was willing to acquire others Huang needed, which lured him to the university in 2007. With funding from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, support from UGA, and his own commitment to help people and the environment, Huang was set up for success.
Now, after years of trial and error, Huang may have solved the problem.
He and his collaborators discovered an electrochemical process that uses specialized anode materials to oxidize and degrade PFAS in water. Through a process called electrochemical oxidation, the specially designed electrodes—made of titanium suboxide anode—can break down carbon-fluorine bonds, leading to the destruction of PFAS.
This solution has been licensed by the global engineering consulting firm AECOM and is marketed under the name DE-FLUORO.
As the first eco-friendly destruction technology, DE-FLUORO prevents further environmental contamination by eradicating “forever chemicals” rather than merely containing them. Due to their strong chemical bonds, existing technologies have focused on simply extracting PFAS from impacted water. Now, based on Huang’s technology, PFAS actually can be degraded in the water, offering a more cost-effective solution by eliminating the need for transfer and disposal of contaminants.
Wastewater facilities can implement this technology at a lower cost than previous methods, and it has already been successfully applied across various waste streams in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
This work earned Huang the distinction of Inventor of the Year at UGA’s 2024 Research Awards, as well as an Innovation Award presented by Georgia Bio, the state’s most impactful life sciences membership organization.
Huang and his team continue to research other ways to degrade these forever chemicals.
“The next step would be further improvement on the performance and system integration to be used in different scenarios,” he said. “We can probably use a cathode to do electrochemical reduction to remove PFAS. Right now, if it’s contaminated ground water, you need to pump it out and clean it and then pump it back. If the reduction pathway works, we can probably put the carbon columns underground to do the treatment right there.”
Huang said he is also investigating options to remove PFAS from soil, using enzymatic treatment to facilitate transformation.
He hopes new technologies will be used by more people, perform better, and be more accessible across a wider range of scenarios.
“That’s the reason I like research,” Huang said. “There is great potential there. We can invent something that can solve a very challenging problem and help people.”
