报告题目：Water: A Molecular Foundry
报告人：Thalappil Pradeep
邀请人：韩宇教授
报告时间：2025年11月11日（星期二）14:30
报告地址：广州国际校区B1-c101
报告摘要：
This talk will explore the interconnected realms of materials chemistry in my laboratory — spanning atomically precise clusters, affordable clean water, droplets, and ice. Sustainable nanotechnology has enabled the creation of materials that selectively remove contaminants such as arsenate and arsenite from water, reducing their concentrations below permissible drinking limits. This research culminated in AMRIT (meaning elixir in Sanskrit), an affordable purification technology that currently delivers 80 million litres of arsenic-, iron-, and uranium-free water every day to 1.4 million people, at a cost of just 2.1 paise (US$0.00026) per litre — the lowest globally.
Beyond purification, our studies have revealed how water itself acts as a molecular foundry, creating matter at the smallest scales. In charged microdroplets, we observed spontaneous weathering of common minerals such as quartz into nanomaterials, while investigations of ice under extreme conditions have uncovered the formation of clathrate hydrates in space-like environments. Together, these studies reveal water’s hidden power — not merely as a solvent, but as a creator of new forms of matter, linking molecular precision with planetary processes.
报告人简介：
Thalappil Pradeep is Institute Professor & Deepak ParekhInstitute Chair Professor of Chemistry at llT Madras, India. Hestudied at University of Calicut, llSc, UC Berkeley, and PurdueUniversity, with research focusing on molecular and nanoscalematerials, He has over 600 scientific papers, 100+ issued pat-ents, and co-founded 7 companies (3 with production units).His technologies-affordable drinking water purification, pesticide removal (reaching 10 million people), and national-approved arsenic removal (AMRlT, serving 1.4 million daily)-arewidely deployed in India. A recipient of major honors (ShantiSwaroop Bhatnagar Prize, TWAS Chemistry Prize 2018, PadmaShri 2020, Nikkei Asia Prize, ENl Award, etc.), he is a Fellow ofIndia’s science/engineering academies, TWAS, AAAS, US Na.tional Academy of Engineering, and Academia Europaea.
He has authored books including Nano: The Essentials andserved as Associate Editor of ACS journals. His popular sciencewriting won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, and he sup.ports a village school educating 500 students through philan-thropy.
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2025年11月7日