For the end of November, I thought I'd perform a public service and post the link to the official website listing the 2025 MacArthur Fellows. The MacArthur fellowship awards are the so-called "genius grants".
(In a year, this link may list the 2026 fellows, because the link doesn't specify the year.)
I don't know any of them personally -- not that I expected to -- but one of them is at Johns Hopkins U in Baltimore.
William Tarpeh's work is particularly useful, in my view.
"Nitrogen-, sulfur-, and phosphorus-containing compounds are ubiquitous in municipal, agricultural, and industrial wastewater. In wastewater, these elements are harmful to the environment and human health, but they are also the basis of essential chemical products including fertilizer and household cleaners. Conventional methods of ammonia stripping, which removes nitrogen from wastewater, require significant energy and chemical inputs. Tarpeh has developed electrochemical-based processes to isolate nitrogen from wastewater using electricity and ion-selective membranes. His electrochemical reactors convert nitrogen in urine waste streams into ammonia-based products, and they can be tuned to produce ammonium sulfate, which is used in fertilizer, or ammonium hydroxide, which is used in household cleaners and industrial chemical production. Unrefined and mixed-source waste streams present additional challenges for resource recovery. The relatively low concentration of nitrogen amidst many other impurities makes it more difficult to efficiently extract and convert it. Tarpeh and colleagues have demonstrated an electrocatalyst-in-a-box (ECaB) that recovers ammonia directly from municipal wastewater. The two-stage reactor assembly first separates nitrogen compounds from wastewater. Electrocatalysis applied in a separate reactor compartment converts the concentrated nitrogen into ammonium sulfate. This technology offers the potential for a closed-loop system that allows local sanitation systems to manufacture needed chemicals. Tarpeh is also developing other technologies, like ligand-exchange adsorbents (materials that bind molecules to their surface) and polymer membranes, to recover resources with industrial applications, such as lithium and phosphorus."
Diagram and citation of a preprint from the Tarpeh Laboratory:
Orisa Z. Coombs, Taigyu Joo, Amilton Barbosa Botelho Junior, Divya Chalise, William A. Tarpeh. Prototyping and modelling a photovoltaic-thermal electrochemical stripping system for distributed urine nitrogen recovery. Nature Water. 2025.
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