JULY 3-4, 2025 • VOL. 64 ISSUE 35
SIU prof seeks to transform ag waste into ‘holy grail’ A researcher at Southern Illinois University Carbondale wants to use agricultural waste products to develop carbon materials specifically designed to trap carbon dioxide, and he has earned a prestigious Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship to pursue the work with colleagues in India. Saikat Talapatra, professor in the School of Physics and Applied Physics, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to coordinate with the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, one of that country’s oldest and world-renowned institutes and one that specializes in synthesizing sustainable carbon-based materials. Because of its focus, the labs at IITK include many of the specific scientific instruments needed to advance the work, making it an ideal partner, Talapatra said. Talapatra hopes to expand on the concept of trapping gases on carbon-based porous nano
materials, a topic he explored as a doctoral student at SIU as far back as 2002. The technology can be used in gas sequestration, separation or in sensor-based platforms. In this case, Talapatra will be working with the biowaste produced by rice farming, one of India’s biggest agricultural sectors and possibly the largest such producer in the world. The researchers will investigate adsorptive surface properties of porous carbon materials obtained from bio-waste products from rice farming and develop them for CO2 capture and storage. With the fellowship scheduled to begin in October, Talapatra can take up to two years to complete his work, which aims to establish the feasibility of such materials. If successful, the materials could be used in the real world in socalled “direct-air capture” settings, though recent research
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suggests this could be challenging. “That would be the holy grail of CO2 capture,” Talapatra said. “But there could be other uses of these materials, if we develop them properly, that, for example,
could be used in greenhouse gas removal, gas separation, methane storage and other forms of applications in energy and environment-related fields.” An example of first-rate research Costas Tsatsoulis, vice chancel-
lor for research and dean of the graduate school at SIU, said Talapatra’s Fulbright fellowship is one more affirmation of his worldclass research work in the field of SEE SIU PAGE 2