A team of UCF researchers is exploring the use of the metal to develop a novel method to rid drinking water of harmful algal blooms, or HABs, which occur when colonies of algae grow out of control and produce toxic or harmful effects on people, fish, birds and other living creatures.

Their project is supported through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) program, which recently awarded $1.2 million to 16 collegiate teams across the United States.

UCF received $75,000 for their two-year project that aims to develop a gold-decorated nickel metal-organic framework (MOF) that removes microcystins — toxins produced by harmful algae blooms — from the water. MOFs are porous clusters of metal polymers that are used in many practical applications.

The UCF student team includes environmental engineering doctoral student Samuel Adjei-Nimoh, materials science and engineering doctoral student Nimanyu Joshi, and environmental engineering undergraduate students Jennifer Hughes and Julia Going. The principal investigator of the grant is Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering Woo Hyoung Lee, and the co-principal investigator is Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Yang Yang.

“MOFs have been used as a catalyst for many research areas such as hydrogen storage, carbon capture, electrocatalysis, biological imaging and sensing, semiconductors and drug delivery systems,” Lee says. “In this project, we’re using the gold-decorated nickel MOF as a photocatalyst to remove water pollutants.”

The gold will be coated in an MOF, which will help it react to the sunlight. That reaction, known as photocatalysis, will result in the oxidation of the microcystins, removing them from the water.

Microcystins are the most common cyanotoxins linked to harmful algal blooms in freshwater environments, notably in regions such as Florida with abundant lakes. They’re known to cause liver damage, kidney failure, gastroenteritis and allergic reactions in humans. With the UCF team’s novel solution, water treatment facilities can produce cleaner, safer drinking water.

“Clean drinking water isn’t just a necessity, it’s a fundamental right, especially for Floridians who rely on our abundant lakes and waterways,” Lee says. “By leveraging the innovative nanotechnology for water treatment,  we’re not only removing toxins but also safeguarding the health and well-being of our communities, ensuring a brighter, healthier future for all.”

This is Lee’s second consecutive year receiving the P3 award. In 2023, his team was selected for their work on a biosensor that could detect microcystins early in their formation for faster eradication.

This is the 20th anniversary of the P3 program. Projects funded this year will tackle critical issues such as removing PFAS from water, combating harmful algal blooms, and materials recovery and reuse, says Chris Frey, assistant administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, in a release.

“I commend these hardworking and creative students and look forward to seeing the results of their innovative projects that are addressing some of our thorniest sustainability and environmental challenges,” Frey says.

About the Researchers

Lee is an associate professor in the UCF Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering. He received his bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering from Chonnam National şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in 1996, his master’s degree in environmental engineering from Korea şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in 2001 and his doctoral degree in environmental engineering from the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Cincinnati in 2009. Before joining UCF, he was an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education postdoctoral research fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Risk Management Research Laboratory in Ohio.

Yang holds joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, which is part of the university’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of UCF’s Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation Cluster. Before joining UCF in 2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He received his doctoral degree in materials science from Tsinghua şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in China.

The new technology, a plasmonic platform that significantly improves the detection of the chirality of molecules, was developed by UCF Professor Debashis Chanda. The work is detailed in a new study published in Science Advances.

Chiral molecules are like pairs of molecules that are similar in structure but are twisted differently (left or right), similar to how a person’s left and right hands are mirror images of each other.

Understanding the nature of chiral molecules is central to biological and pharmaceutical research because the mirror image pairs — known as enantiomers — can each have different effects in the body or in chemical reactions.

Nearly 56% of all modern drugs and medicine are chiral in nature and about 90% of those are a mixture containing equal amounts of two enantiomers of a chiral compound.

Researchers often face the challenge of separating enantiomers or synthesizing only the desired enantiomer to ensure optimal therapeutic outcomes and minimize adverse effects.

Chanda says accuracy in determining the purity of a sample of chiral molecules is paramount.

“In some cases, one enantiomer is the active ingredient while the other is dormant, leading to an overall reduction in the potency of the drug,” he says. “As a result, the need for enantiomeric identification and purification is in crucial demand in the field of medical and pharmaceutical research.”

He says his platform’s simplicity, tunability and sensitivity could be a game changer.

“Such a system has great potential in pharmaceutical and drug industries where high-sensitive, high-throughput and low-cost enantiomeric purity determination is critically important,” he says.

How the Technology Works

The sensor is composed of a symmetric achiral (nonmirrored) nanoscale gold hole-disk pattern on top of an optical cavity. When illuminated with a rotating polarized light, it produces a densely chiral light with a strong, concentrated swirling motion, called superchiral light, on top of the sensor surface. This occurs due to the strong, nanoscale coupling created between the electron (plasmon) resonances on the gold pattern and the resonances in the optical cavity.

When a chiral molecule is added on top of the sensor, it produces differential reflection between a right circularly polarized light and a left circularly polarized light, which enables the detection ability. Unlike other similar sensors that add their own “twist” to the light, the symmetric achiral nature of the UCF sensor suppresses chiral response from the sensor itself, which ensures chiral response solely from the target molecule.  Hence, this novel approach enables precise identification of subtle molecular differences, marking a significant advancement in the field.

Chanda’s platform can quantify the purity of chiral enantiomers with a sensitivity nearly 13 orders of magnitude greater than the current method and provides cost savings due to the nanoimprinting based low-cost sensor fabrication, significantly lower concentrations and fewer molecules needed for accurate detection.

Next Steps

Chanda hopes to see his platform and research applied in a way that increases the accuracy and efficiency of subsequent research and development.

“We aim to contribute towards the development of inexpensive and fast drug identification methods for photonics and pharmaceutical research, fabrication of novel devices exhibiting superior light-matter interaction and demonstrate a real and reliable product that is commercially viable,” Chanda says.

In addition to Chanda, the study’s research team included Aritra Biswas with UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL); and Pablo Cencillo-Abad, Muhammed Shabbir, and Manobina Karmakar with UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center.

For more information on the technology, including licensing opportunities, please visit the .

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Researcher’s Credentials

Chanda has joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center, Department of Physics and CREOL. He also leads the university’s . He received his doctorate in photonics from the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Toronto and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined UCF in Fall 2012.

Study Title: Tunable plasmonic superchiral light for ultrasensitive detection of chiral molecules

In this role, Khondaker will focus on driving further growth of research development and partnership, critical elements of the UCF research enterprise. This will include expanding the successful NSF CAREER mentoring program to target early career programs of other federal agencies, which will support the increased and earlier success of faculty receiving such prestigious awards. He also will be responsible for ensuring strong collaborative engagement with external entities, such as connecting UCF researchers with research partners in the region.

“Saiful has been a longstanding OR faculty fellow with a strong dedication to faculty support and success,” says Winston Schoenfeld, UCF’s Interim Vice President for Research and Innovation. “Since 2019, he has led the NSF CAREER Award mentoring program, resulting in an impressive fourfold increase in awards to UCF’s early career faculty. I look forward to the continued success of our faculty through his leadership and am pleased to have him oversee our Research Advancement group.”

Academic Excellence

Khondaker received his doctoral degree in semiconductor physics in 1999 from the Cavendish Laboratory of the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Cambridge in England. He then worked at the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Texas at Austin as a postdoctoral fellow and then as an assistant director for UT Austin’s Center for Nano and Molecular Science and Technology.

He joined UCF in 2005 as a tenure-track assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2010 and full professor in 2017. In 2019, he was appointed as the inaugural Office of Research Faculty Fellow, where he brought a key, faculty perspective to research administration.

In this role, he spearheaded a junior faculty mentoring program aimed at increasing grant success, resulting in the attainment of 34 U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER awards in the last five years.

Khondaker has also contributed strategic planning for research development and the establishment and implementation of UCF’s Seed Funding initiatives. He has led an effort in enhancing the support infrastructure for UCF’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates programs and has served as the nanotechnology M.S. program director at UCF since 2019. Additionally, he’s served on the UCF Faculty Senate and Faculty Excellence Committees.

Research Expertise

Khondaker is the director of the NSF-funded PREM Center for Ultrafast Dynamics and Catalysis in Emerging Materials, and his research focuses on the fabrication of nanoscale electronic devices and their associated electron transport phenomenon.

He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles in high-impact-factor journals with over 10,500 citations and has delivered over 70 invited talks. Khondaker is a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER award, multiple UCF research incentive awards, the UCF Teaching Incentive Award, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Invitational Fellowship, and the U.S. Airforce Summer Fellowship.

“I am excited about this opportunity and plan to use it to promote UCF’s faculty research portfolio for increased partnership, funding and visibility,” Khondaker says. “I look forward to working with faculty and other stakeholders in supporting and advancing UCF’s research infrastructures and accelerating significant growth in research enterprise at UCF.”

The optical sensor uses nanotechnology to accurately identify viruses in seconds from blood samples. Researchers say the device can tell with 95% accuracy if someone has a virus, a significant improvement over current rapid tests that experts warn could have low accuracy. Testing for viruses is important for early treatment and to help stop their spread.

The results are detailed in a new study in the journal Nano Letters.

The researchers tested the device using samples of Dengue virus, a mosquito transmitted pathogen that causes Dengue fever and is a threat to people in the tropics. However, the technology can easily be adapted to detect other viruses, like COVID-19, says study co-author Debashis Chanda, a professor in UCF’s

“The sensitive optical sensor, along with the rapid fabrication approach used in this work, promises the translation of this promising technology to any virus detection including COVID-19 and its mutations with high degree of specificity and accuracy,” Chanda says. “Here, we demonstrated a credible technique which combines PCR-like genetic coding and optics on a chip for accurate virus detection directly from blood.”

The device closely matches the accuracy of the gold-standard PCR-based tests but with nearly instantaneous results instead of results that take several days to receive. Its accuracy is also a significant improvement over current rapid antigen tests that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Centers for Disease Control have cautioned could produce inaccurate results if viral loads are low or test instructions are not properly followed.

The device works by using nano-scale patterns of gold that reflect back the signature of the virus it is set to detect in a sample of blood. Different viruses can be detected by using different DNA sequences that selectively target specific viruses.

Key to the device’s performance is that it can detect viruses directly from blood samples without the need for sample preparation or purification, thus speeding up the test and improving its accuracy.

“A vast majority of biosensors demonstrations in the literature utilize buffer solutions as the test matrix to contain the target analyte,” Chanda says. “However, these approaches are not practical in real-life applications because complex biological fluids, such as blood, containing the target biomarkers are the main source for sensing and at the same time the main source of protein fouling leading to sensor failure.”

The researchers confirmed the device’s effectiveness with multiple tests that used different virus concentration levels and solution environments, including those with the presence of nontarget virus biomarkers.

Abraham Vazquez-Guardado, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą who worked on the research as a doctoral student in Chanda’s lab, says he’s excited about the potential.

“Although there have been previous optical biosensing demonstration in human serum, they still require off-line complex and dedicated sample preparation performed by skilled personnel — a commodity not available in typical point of care applications,” Vazquez-Guardado says. “This work demonstrated for the first time an integrated device which separated plasma from the blood and detects the target virus without any pre-processing with potential for near future practical usages.”

Chanda says next steps for the research include adapting the device to detect more viruses.

Study co-authors are Freya Mehta, Beatriz Jimenez, Keval Ray, Aliyah Baksh — undergraduate students at NanoScience Technology Center; Aritra Biswas ’21MS — a doctoral student with UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics; Sang Lee ’16  — a master’s student at the NanoScience Technology Center; Nileshi Saraf — a graduate of UCF’s doctoral program; and Professor Sudipta Seal —chair of UCF’s Department of Material Science and Engineering.

Chanda has a joint appointment in UCF’s Department of NanoScience Technology Center, the and the College of Optics and Photonics. He received his doctorate in photonics from the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Toronto and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining UCF in 2012.

The research was partially supported by National Science Foundation and UCF’s COVID-19 Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Initiative program.

Researchers at the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą have designed for the first time a nanoscale material that can efficiently split seawater into oxygen and a clean energy fuel — hydrogen. The process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is known as electrolysis and effectively doing it has been a challenge until now.

The stable, and long-lasting nanoscale material to catalyze the reaction, which the UCF team developed, is explained this month in the journal Advanced Materials.

“This development will open a new window for efficiently producing clean hydrogen fuel from seawater,” says Yang Yang, an associate professor in UCF’s and study co-author.

Hydrogen could be converted into electricity to use in fuel cell technology that generates water as product and makes an overall sustainable energy cycle, Yang says.

How It Works

The researchers developed a thin-film material with nanostructures on the surface made of nickel selenide with added, or “doped,” iron and phosphor. This combination offers the high performance and stability that are needed for industrial-scale electrolysis but that has been difficult to achieve because of issues, such as competing reactions, within the system that threaten efficiency.

The new material balances the competing reactions in a way that is low-cost and high-performance, Yang says.

Using their design, the researchers achieved high efficiency and long-term stability for more than 200 hours.

“The seawater electrolysis performance achieved by the dual-doped film far surpasses those of the most recently reported, state-of-the-art electrolysis catalysts and meets the demanding requirements needed for practical application in the industries,” Yang says.

The researcher says the team will work to continue to improve the electrical efficiency of the materials they’ve developed. They are also looking for opportunities and funding to accelerate and help commercialize the work.

More About The Team

Co-authors included Jinfa Chang, a postdoctoral scholar, and Guanzhi Wang, a doctoral student in materials science engineering, both with UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center; and Ruslan Kuliiev ’20MS, a graduate of UCF’s master’s in aerospace engineering program, and Nina Orlovskaya, an associate professor with UCF’s , and Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation Cluster.

Yang holds joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and the , which is part of the university’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of UCF’s Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation (REACT) Cluster. He also holds a secondary joint-appointment in UCF’s . Before joining UCF in 2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He received his doctorate in materials science from Tsinghua şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in China.

Laurene Tetard, an associate professor in UCF’s Department of Physics, and Xiaohu Xia, an assistant professor in UCF’s Department of Chemistry, were selected as fellows by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement as part of its Scialog initiative to mitigate zoonotic threats, or those originating from animals. Tetard and Xia also both have joint appointments in UCF’s Nanoscience Technology Center.

The researchers join UCF College of Medicine Assistant Professor Salvador Almagro-Moreno and more than 50 other researchers across the nation who have received the honor.

The Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) was founded in 1912 and is the oldest foundation for science advancement in the U.S.

The origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is still under debate, but its possible animal origin means researchers are giving special focus to zoonotic diseases and ones that could emerge in the future.

“A deeper understanding of the interactions between animals, people, pathogens and their environments could expand our ability to rapidly detect emerging pathogens and to quickly develop and deploy new countermeasures,” says RCSA Program Director Andrew Feig.

Created in 2010 by RCSA, the Scialog (short for “science + dialog”) format brings together communities of early-career scientists from multiple disciplines and institutions across the U.S. and Canada, and this initiative includes both academic and U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists with the vision of spurring stronger interactions between these groups.

The three-year initiative for addressing zoonotic threats will first meet this fall in Tucson, Arizona.

Guided by a group of senior facilitators, participants will discuss challenges and gaps in current knowledge, build community around visionary goals, and form teams to propose cutting-edge, collaborative research projects. Those considered to have the potential for high-impact results will be selected to receive seed funding.

Tetard says research chosen will stem from the discussions but that her contributions to the community will include her expertise with nanoscale imaging and spectroscopy, which can show how zoonotic threats change over time.

“Viruses and bacteria are small systems that have not been studied extensively with new nanoscale tools, such as those we are working on at UCF,” Tetard says. “Nanoscale imaging and spectroscopy provides the spatial resolution and the sensitivity to detect such small systems and study how they evolve. Participating in this initiative could help in advancing the development of new tools that are better suited for problems related to zoonotic threats. I’m very excited about taking part in these conversations.”

Xia will bring his work with developing advanced nanotechnologies for diagnostics to the Scialog research community.

“I am honored to be selected as a Scialog Fellow, and I am excited for the opportunity to collaborate with leading scientists from multiple disciplines to develop innovative technologies for detection and mitigation of zoonotic threats,” Xia says. “With the support of this fellowship, I’d like to expand my research to the field of detection and diagnosis of zoonotic diseases. I am thrilled by this opportunity to work in a new field. Ultimately, I hope that my research will contribute to mitigation of existing and emerging zoonotic threats.”

Tetard received her doctorate in physics from the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Tennessee, Knoxville and joined UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and Department of Physics, part of UCF’s College of Sciences, in 2013.

Xia received his doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology from Xiamen şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą and joined UCF’s Department of Chemistry, part of UCF’s College of Sciences, in 2018.

In a study published recently in the journal , UCF assistant professor Yang Yang and co-authors demonstrated the ability of the new design to be both durable and high performing.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it’s important to work toward developing batteries with environmentally friendly and nonflammable components, as Americans throw billions of batteries into the trash every year.

These batteries contain toxic metals and solvents that can leak from buried batteries and contaminate soil and groundwater.

The new seawater battery UCF helped develop is a step in the environmentally friendly direction as it replaces the toxic solvent that current lithium-ion batteries contain with benign seawater.

Current lithium-ion battery solvents are also flammable, making the batteries a fire hazard if they are damaged or overheat. They can also cause fires in landfills when improperly disposed there.

Researchers have tried to overcome the problem of a toxic and flammable solvent by using water-based zinc batteries, but this has been limited by problems with internal zinc growth on the anode, which hinders battery lifespan and durability.

The new design fixes this issue by using a zinc-manganese nano-alloy to form the battery’s anode, which is an internal metal structure that generates electrons that travel to a similar structure, the cathode, inside the battery, thus creating a current and power.

Anodes and cathodes are known as electrodes because of their ability to conduct electricity.

“We developed a durable and robust 3D electrode that can be used for seawater batteries under extreme conditions,” Yang says. “We’ve worked on aqueous batteries and the use of seawater resources for many years, so we have expertise in the field and know where it should go.”

Yang is an expert in battery improvement and alternative fuel cell technologies.

He says they used seawater as the battery electrolyte, or chemical medium that allows the electrical charge to flow between anode and cathode, because of its abundance and for its potential use in deep-sea energy storage applications.

For example, seawater batteries could be used to power undersea vehicles. And for the alloy they developed, it could be used in both water and non-water-based batteries, Yang says.

In the study, the researchers tested the design and found that the alloy-coated anode remained stable without degrading throughout 1,000 hours of charge and discharge cycling under a high current density of 80 milliampere per square centimeter.

The alloy’s stability was confirmed with synchrotron X-ray characterizations that tracked atomic and chemical changes of the anode in different stages of operation.

The researchers are also currently investigating the use of other metal alloys in addition to zinc-manganese.

Study co-authors were Huajun Tian, Zhao Li, David Fox, Lei Zhai and Akihiro Kushima with UCF; Guangxia Feng and Xiaonan Shan with the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Houston; Zhenzhong Yang and Yingge Du with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Maoyu Wang and Zhenxing Feng with Oregon State şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą; and Hua Zhou with Argonne National Laboratory.

The research was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation.

Yang holds joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and the , which is part of the university’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of UCF’s Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation (REACT) Cluster. Before joining UCF in 2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He received his doctorate in materials science from Tsinghua şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in China.

Assistant Professor Yang Yang is doing this by making the batteries more efficient, with some of his latest work focusing on keeping an internal metal structure, the anode, from falling apart over time by applying a thin, film-like coating of copper and tin. The new technique is detailed in a recent study in the journal Advanced Materials.

An anode generates electrons that travel to a similar structure, the cathode, inside the battery, thus creating a current and power.

“Our work has shown that the rate of degradation of the anode can be reduced by more than 1,000 percent by using a copper-tin film compared to a tin film that is often used,” said Yang, who is with UCF’s .

Yang is an expert in battery improvement including making them safer and able to withstand extreme temperatures.

The technique is unique because of its use of the copper-tin alloy and is an important improvement in stabilizing rechargeable battery performance, Yang says. It is also scalable for use in the smallest smartphone battery to larger batteries that power electric cars and trucks.

“We are motivated by our most recent research progress in alloyed materials for various applications,” he says. “Each alloy is unique in composition, structure and property.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation through its Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems’ Electrochemical Systems program and through UCF’s startup funding and preeminent postdoctoral programs.

Study co-authors included Guanzhi Wang, a doctoral student in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center, , and the paper’s first author; Megan Aubin, a doctoral student in UCF’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Abhishek Mehta, a graduate of UCF’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering doctoral program; Huajun Tian and Jinfa Chang, postdoctoral scholars in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center; Akihiro Kushima, an assistant professor in UCF’s Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center; and Yongho Sohn; a professor in UCF’s Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center.

Yang holds joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, which is part of the university’s . He is a member of UCF’s Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation (REACT) Cluster. Before joining UCF in 2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He received his doctorate in materials science from Tsinghua şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in China.

The work has implications in creating nighttime camouflage that conceals objects from infrared vision, as well as in methods for anticounterfeiting, tagging and energy management.

“Any material always leaves behind an infrared signature based on its temperature,” says Debashis Chanda, an associate professor in UCF’s and principal investigator of the research.

“If we can change the signature of a material, engineer the surface in such a way that it doesn’t emit certain wavelengths or does emit others, that not only helps us to improve concealment but also anticounterfeiting applications,” Chanda says. “And controlling thermal emissions plays a role in energy management because we could actually change the amount of energy dissipated from the surface so energy can be saved.”

The technology works by using nanoscale structures on chosen combinations of material stacks that can be adjusted to control which wavelengths of light are emitted.

For night vision, this means creating a material that doesn’t give off an infrared signature, thus concealing it from cameras that look for infrared signatures in the dark when visible light isn’t available.

For anticounterfeiting, this means placing a material with a certain wavelength signature on an object so that the signature can only be read with a device tuned to detect that signature.

The $2.5 million funding over 5 years will allow Chanda and his team to further research how light interacts with matter and also scale up their work to create materials, such as paint, that can conceal energy signatures over larger areas and explore ways to keep materials cool by controlling their energy emissions.

As part of this research, Chanda’s group is acquiring a more than $500,000 complex scattering near-field optical microscope that includes nanoscale Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, IR nano-imaging, atomic force microscopy-based infrared spectroscopy and ultrafast pump-probe modules. This will allow them to study electron and photon propagation, dynamics, scattering and interaction with materials.

“These delicate measurements can now be done inside a single instrument in a coherent manner to further understand light-matter interactions for efficient infrared emission control,” Chanda says.

Previous work by the Chanda group has demonstrated that its technique can be used to conceal or detect coded information.

Chanda has joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center, and . He received his doctorate in photonics from the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Toronto and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of Illinois. Chanda joined UCF in Fall 2012.

The work is funded by a recent $490,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Agriculture and Food Research Initiative grant to create an easy-to-use and highly sensitive device to detect food fraud, such as the substitution of pork in beef products.

Adulterated food results in people paying more for their food than it’s worth, as sometimes foods are bulked up with less expensive filler products. Eating the wrong food can also violate some religious restrictions on foods consumed and be a concern for people with food allergies.

Adulterated food is a problem for the U.S. food industry as well, costing it $10 billion to $15 billion a year, according the Consumer Brands Association.

Leading types of reported fraudulent food are fish and seafood, oils and fats, alcoholic beverages, meat and meat products, dairy products, grains and grain products, honey and other natural sweeteners.

Current tests to detect adulterated food are either expensive and complicated or are easy to use and cheap, but not as effective, says

Xiaohu Xia, an assistant professor in UCF’s and the project’s principal investigator.

“This research aims to establish a simple method using a new test strip, similar to a home pregnancy test, to detect if there are adulterants in food products,” he says. “It would be a test inspectors, as well as consumers, could use.”

To do this, the researcher and his team will update existing detection technology, known as a colorimetric lateral flow assay, which uses gold nanoparticles to detect meat proteins. They will create a new metallic coating, made of platinum, palladium or iridium, that will go around the gold nanoparticles to increase their sensitivity.

Preliminary results showed that using a platinum coating made the tests 100 times more sensitive than current colorimetric lateral flow assays. This makes them closer in effectiveness to the more expensive and complicated, but precise, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays.

The researchers will now work to increase the sensitivity and reliability of their test, including by using different metals for the coating. For this project, they are specifically looking for the presence of meat and blood in foods, such as pork protein in a sample of beef.

The work build’s on Xia’s research into biosensing, including recent work to create a biosensor for early cancer detection.

Xia will collaborate with Qinchun Rao, an assistant professor in Florida State şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ąâ€™s Department of Nutrition, Food and Exercise Sciences. Xia’s lab will be building the test strip, while Rao’s lab will be testing its effectiveness in detecting adulterated meat. The project is scheduled for completion in 2023.

Xia joined UCF’s Department of Chemistry, part of UCF’s College of Sciences, in 2018. He has a joint appointment in UCF’s . Prior to his appointment at UCF, he worked at Michigan Technological şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą as an assistant professor and at Georgia Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher. He has published more than 50 journal articles and received multiple research grants.