November 2025 Boya co-chaired a session with Prof. Adeyemi S. Adeleye and Prof. Yiming Su- the “Sources, fate, and effects of nano/microplastics” at the 14th NANO Conference, San Diego, and presented their recent AFM and custom abrasion device approach in understanding novel insights of nanoplastic release mechanisms.
November 2025 Boya was invited to speak at the OECD Workshop on the Toxicity and Stability of Fragmented Nano-plastics (12-14 November 2025) (Paris)- “Session 5. Environmental Relevance & Fate: Weathering and Physical/Chemical Transformation Techniques”. The workshop aims to organize a few nations' leading efforts towards standardizing microplastic and nanoplastic testing and reference material, environmental analyses, weathering protocols, exposure measurements, and toxicity testing. Boya's contribution was to bring insights into environmentally relevant properties due to weathering, specifically via mechanical and abrasive pathways.
October 2025 Boya Xiong was invited to speak at SciX 2025 annual conference, session “Unraveling Polymers - Designing for Sustainable Environmental Futures”. Boya presented their novel high-resolution mass spectrometry and atomic force microscopy-based method to probe properties of environmental plastic and polymer degradation products that are relevant to health.
October 2025 Boya Xiong was invited to speak at Procter & Gamble's 2025 ELC Series – Environmental Science & Sustainability Community on water-soluble polymer detection methods and generation of micro- and nanoplastics from environmental weathering.
October 2025 Sarah has won the Three-Minute Thesis competition at the department and the college level. What an outstanding achievement! The 3-Minute Thesis (3MT®) is a research communication competition that challenges students to communicate the significance of their projects without the use of props or industry jargon, in just three minutes. 3MT develops academic, presentation, and research communication skills and supports the development of research students' capacity to quickly explain their research in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience leaving them wanting to know more. Sarah made tremedous efforts in developing her science communication skills -she has mentored over 6 undergraduate students for research, participated in three outreach activities, and is developing a research based high school curriculum with two local high school teachers.
September 2025 The Xiong group welcomes two new members: MS student Jacob Hubbard and PhD student Alexa Chesley, coadvised by Prof. Sebastian Behrens. Jacob and Alexa will be investigating the occurrence and impact of microplastics in Minnesota's wastewater treatment plants, funded by LCCMR.
August 2025 The Xiong group welcomes the newest addition to the group - Boya's son Linfeng Wang! Boya is joyful with the baby and everyone's blessings.
August 2025 Phoebe defended her PhD. Ccongratulations Dr. Keyes! Her dissertation is titled "Free radical degradation of water-soluble polymer: novel detection, reaction mechanisms, and implications". It has been quite an adventure for Phoebe and Boya to explore a completely new territory - using HRMS nontarget to detect water soluble polymer degradation products. Also, congratulations to Boya for graduating the first PhD student!
July 2025 Sarah Ziemann and Suprio Kamal were recipients of the 2025 ACS Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholars Recognition Program. This program is to recognize talented graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the chemical sciences who demonstrate leadership in mentoring, promotion of inclusion and belonging, and promotion of research safety. Congratulations!
June 2025 Prof. Boya Xiong is officially awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER on "Unraveling nanoplastic release from nanoscale mechanical degradation: Enabling sustainable design of polymers and defining future engineer". This work has been developed by preliminary work done by PhD students Ehsanur Rahman, Sarah Ziemann, Phoebe Keyes, postdoc Sara BA, MS student Claire, and collaborator Greg Haugstad, and funded by the NSF Center for Sustainable Polymer seed grants. Big congrats to the Xiong group and Boya!
June 2025 Prof. Boya Xiong is invited to speak at the 2025 Gordon Research Conference: Environmental Nanotechnology. It's a great honor!
May 2025 Ji Qin presented his work on a novel nanocellulose functionalized microfiltration membrane for antifouling, biofilm control, and pathogen removal at NAMS 2025 and AEESP 2025. Great work!
May 2025 Prof. Boya Xiong is recognized at the CSE University and Collegiate Awards Ceremony, Board of Regents Recognition Ceremony, McKnight Awards Dinner
March 2025 Prof. Xiong is awarded the University McKnight Land-Grant Professorship along with 11 other assistant professors from 5 Colleges. This is the most prestigious award for assistant professors at UMN, recognizing their outstanding contributions and potential to advance research and academic excellence. The central purpose of the Professorship program is to strengthen the University’s faculty for the future. The program is designed to advance the careers of outstanding junior faculty members who have been identified as having the potential to make significant contributions to their departments and to their scholarly fields. The program is also intended to help build loyalty to the University of Minnesota. The designation of “McKnight Land-Grant Professor” is held by recipients for a two-year period.
March 2025 Congratulations to Ji Qin and Tariq Bastawisy publishing in ACS ES&T Engineering on Moringa-coated antiviral material for personal protection equipment application. This work was funded by CDC. This work was in collaboration with Prof. Danmeng Shuai and his PhD student Jiahao Chen. "Qin, J., Bastawisy, T., Chen, J., Gong, M., Johnston, S., Pan, Z., Romay, F., Shuai, D., Ou, Q., and Xiong, B*., (2025). An antiviral, stable, and regeneratable coating on textile facecovering by Moringa Oleifera protein. ACS E&ST Engineering. Just accepted."
Antiviral personal protective equipment (PPE) (e.g., face masks) could extend the service life of single-use PPE and reduce the pollution of single-use plastics. However, the prevalence of nanomaterials and chemical-embedded antiviral agents can impose environmental and health risks when leached. Here, we developed a highly effective and nontoxic antiviral coating on commercial textiles using natural Moringa oleifera seed proteins. A simple dip coating method of polyester textiles using seed water extracts was effective because of the rapid electrostatic attraction between cationic proteins and negatively charged polyesters. The coating time and seed usage were minimized by studying the adsorption of protein onto textiles under varying times, protein-to-textile ratios, and protein concentrations. In only 15 min, the optimized protein coating achieved a ∼5.4 log10 reduction of infectivity of murine hepatitis virus, a SARS-CoV-2 surrogate. Such performance is better than or comparable to previously reported synthetic materials. The coated textile remained effective after repeated viral exposure, dry storage, and UV exposure and can be regenerated. This is the first demonstration of Moringa protein coating on textiles for broad antiviral PPE applications (respirators and gowns) controlling β-coronaviruses. Such a coating can also be applied as a novel disinfection agent for high-touch surfaces.
March 2025 Congratulations to Suprio Kamal for publishing his first paper in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering! "Kamal, S., Carew, K., Qin, J., Hatinoglu, D., Rahman, E., Apul, O., Xiong, B.*, Combined adsorption and Michaelis-Menten approach reveals predominant enzymatic depolymerization of crystalline poly(ethylene terephthalate) occurs in solution phase. ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2025, 13, 6, 2401–2410".
Low conversion of enzymatic hydrolysis of crystalline poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) impacts its recycling and end-of-life persistence. Yet, the mechanistic insights into the heterogeneous enzymatic reaction process and the impact of crystallinity remain poorly understood. Here, we combined adsorption and Michaelis–Menten kinetic experiments to examine the influence of PET crystallinity and particle size on depolymerization by a commercial cutinase (HiC). Batch adsorption experiments and modeling revealed that HiC adsorption was unaffected by PET crystallinity. Conventional and inverse Michaelis–Menten kinetic experiments and modeling indicated that the low hydrolysis rates of crystalline PET were more due to slower kinetics rather than low reaction densities. Under the same crystallinity, intrinsic reactivity between different particle sizes was different for amorphous PET. Furthermore, the reaction densities of HiC exceeded adsorption densities by 3–10-fold across all PET, implying that solution phase hydrolysis of oligomers released by initially adsorbed enzyme yielded most monomer products. Finally, prephotoweathering increased initial hydrolysis rates up to an order of magnitude for amorphous PET, highlighting the potential role of UV in PET recycling and environmental persistence. Overall, quantitative insights from this work can guide the rational design of enzymes and recycling processes and inform the end-of-life fate of PET waste.
November 2024 Prof. Xiong and Ehsanur Rahman attended their first Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization conference in Rhode Island and delivered a talk on their AFM work in probing nanoplastic release. Congratulations to Ehsanur for winning the student Award, poster award, 2nd NanoPitch competition, amazing! He was a big student winner at the conference!
November 2024 Congratulations to Suprio Kamal, Ji Qin, Ehsanur Rahman, Sarah Ziemann for coauthering a paper on microplastic removal published in Environmental Engineering Science. This work is in collaboration with Prof. Cari Dutcher and her PhD student Chinmayee Panigrahi. "Panigrahi, C., Kamal, S., Qin, J., Ziemann, S., Rahman, E., House, M., Dutcher, C., Xiong, B.*, (2024). Removal of Pristine and UV-Weathered Microplastics from Water: Moringa oleifera Seed Protein as a Natural Coagulant. Environmental and Engineering Science. doi.org/10.1089/ees.2024.0135"
The prevalence of microplastics (MPs) poses significant threats to freshwater ecosystem and human health worldwide. Although synthetic coagulation and flocculation chemicals have demonstrated initial success in removing certain MPs, naturally abundant and nontoxic coagulants and flocculants can potentially reduce the carbon emission of centralized water treatment plants and could be better candidates for the removal of MPs in open natural water systems without adverse ecological impacts. In this study, Moringa oleifera-derived protein-based coagulant and flocculant, particularly the Moringa oleifera cationic protein (MOCP) and protein-coated sand (f-sand) were developed to remove pristine and photo-weathered polyethylene (PE) MPs, which was compared to conventional synthetic alum and polyacrylamide (PAM) chemicals. Through lab-scale ballasted flocculation jar tests, we found the MOCP performed comparably to conventional alum in removing pristine and photo-weathered MPs in distilled water when using PAM as the flocculant (70% removal). The f-sand alone was less effective, but still achieved 60% removal for photo-weathered MPs. The MOCP and f-sand combined were the least effective, likely due to the charge reversal and less incorporation of MPs into flocs. MOCP+PAM and f-sand alone also were similarly effective in removing pristine and photo-weathered MPs suspended in Mississippi River water, compared to alum+PAM. Preliminary results also demonstrated the potential to treat MPs using MOCP in real river water. Our findings suggest that MOCP and f-sand can be effective, sustainable, eco-friendly, and affordable alternatives for conventional synthetic alum/PAM chemicals for mitigating MPs pollution in drinking water and in open surface water where the use of synthetic chemicals might be prohibited.
October 2024 Prof. Xiong was selected as the Honorary Member of Tau Chi Alpha, Environmental Engineering Honor Society.
October 2024 Prof. Xiong chaired her first technical talk session at the 45th SETAC North America Annual Meeting, “Environmental Fate of polymers” along with Dow Chemical Scientists. She also delivered a well-received talk on “Critical review of the environmental lifetime of non-biodegradable plastics.”
September 2024 We are receiving the ACS-Petroleum Research Fund New Directions (ND) Grant titled "A structure-property study of the impact of photo-oxidation on nanoscale wear and friction of semicrystalline thermoplastics". We will reveal nanoscale wear mechanisms for thermoplastics using our novel AFM nanoscratch tests to inform harmful nanoplastic release as well as aging behavior of our infrastructure that is largely built upon thermoplastics. Congratulations!
August 2024 We are receiving funding from the European Chemical Industry Council- Long-Range Research Initiative to study the impact of additive formulation on the environmental degradation of plastics and microplastic release. Congratulations to the team of PI Syeed Islanker (NDSU), co-PIs Onur Apul (PSU) and Bakhtiyor Rasulev (NDSU)!
August 2024 Congratulations to Suprio Kamal for winning the Scholarship award from the Environmental Research and Education Foundation! This scholarship recognizes excellence in master’s and doctoral waste management research and education. Scholarships provide a monthly stipend from the time of the award until the student graduates.
August 2024 Prof. Xiong was invited to talk at the Special Symposium on Women in Science & Engineering during the ACS Fall Annual meeting in Denver. This is a great honor to celebrate the success of women scientists in Science & Engineering.
June 2024 Congratulations to Ehsanur Rahman's paper published in Environmental Science & Technology and congrats to all the coauthors as well. "Rahman, E., BinAhmed, S., Keyes, P., Alberg, C., Godfreey-Igwe, S., Haugstad, G., Xiong, B*., Nanoscale abrasive wear of polyethylene: a novel approach to probe nanoplastic release at the single asperity level. 2024, 58, 31, 13845–13855" The work is also selected as the front cover.
There is a growing concern that nanoplastic pollution may pose planetary threats to human and ecosystem health. However, a quantitative and mechanistic understanding of nanoplastic release via nanoscale mechanical degradation of bulk plastics and its interplay with photoweathering remains elusive. We developed a lateral force microscope (LFM)-based nanoscratch method to investigate mechanisms of nanoscale abrasive wear of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) surfaces by a single sand particle (simulated by a 300 nm tip) under environmentally relevant load, sliding motion, and sand size. For virgin LDPE, we found plowing as the dominant wear mechanism (i.e., deformed material pushed around the perimeter of scratch). After UVA-weathering, the wear mechanism of LDPE distinctively shifted to cutting wear (i.e., deformed material detached and pushed to the end of scratch). The shift in the mechanism was quantitatively described by a new parameter, which can be incorporated into calculating the NP release rate. We determined a 10-fold higher wear rate due to UV weathering. We also observed an unexpected resistance to initiate wear for UV-aged LDPE, likely due to nanohardness increase induced by UV. For the first time, we report 0.4–4 × 10–3 μm3/μm sliding distance/μN applied load as an initial approximate nanoplastic release rate for LDPE. Our novel findings reveal nanoplastic release mechanisms in the environment, enabling physics-based prediction of the global environmental inventory of nanoplastics.
June 2024 Phoebe won the best poster award at the Gordon Research Conference: Water!!! Her poster on novel HRMS workflow to decipher polymer degradation products was one of the 4 selected out of hundreds of submissions and she delivered a 5-minute oral version of her work at the conference. Boya as a graduate student won the same award in 2018 and felt very proud of Phoebe's accomplishment!
June 2024 Prof. Xiong was invited to deliver an invited keynote for the session on Environment and Sustainability at the 2024 ACS Colloid and Surface Science Symposium. This was the first time Boya attended an ACS CSSS meeting!
May 2024 Congratulations to Pheobe Keyes for her first paper published in Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts! "Keyes, P., Halimah, N., Xiong, B*., Deciphering polymer degradation chemistry via integrating novel database construction into suspect screening analysis.2024,26, 1184-119"
Water-soluble synthetic polymers and their environmental degradation products are overlooked but important industrial pollutants in wastewater. However, the detection of degradation products is limited to bulk solution chemistry and molecular-level analysis remains unreachable. In this work, we assessed the feasibility of current suspect screening and nontarget workflow using liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) to elucidate molecular level information about polyacrylamide (PAM) and its degraded products by free radicals. Radical chain scission of PAM (10 kDa) using heat-activated persulfate was conducted to simulate hydraulic fracturing conditions in the deep subsurface. We found that the current workflows in the commercial software generated predicted formulae with low accuracy, due to limited capability of peak picking and formula prediction for high mass and charge features. By modeling literature-reported degradation pathways, we constructed a degradation product database of over 463,000 unique formulae, which improved the accuracy of the predicted formula. For the matched features, the ratio of aldehyde/ketone terminating molecule abundance was found to increase over 24 h degradation time, suggesting increasing content of aldehydes by radical-induced oxidative chain scission of PAM. This is contradictory to previously proposed ratios of carbon-centered radical position on polymer backbone initiated by hydroxyl radicals. Using in silico fragmentation of MS1 features, we identified 11 structures with confidence levels 2b and 3 using their MS2 information. This is the first attempt to resolve complex polymer degradation chemistry using HRMS that can advance our ability to detect water-soluble polymer pollutants and their transformation products in environmental samples.
May 2024 Prof. Xiong, Sarah Ziemann, Suprio Kamal, and Jayson Sadeen hosted a STEMFEST event educating microplastic pollution!
2024 Prof. Xiong awarded the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists 40 Under 40 Recognition Program!
2023 Prof. Xiong awarded ASCE MN chapter and MFESTS Young Engineer of the Year! The Minnesota Federation of Engineering, Science and Technology Societies (MFESTS) annually presents an award to an individual selected from a list of nominees submitted by the MFESTS member societies ( e.g., ASCE MN chapter). The award recognizes outstanding achievements by an engineer who is less than 35 years of age, who are outstanding based on their educational and collegiate achievements; professional society activities; technical society activities; civil and humanitarian activities; continuing competence; engineering achievements; and professional experience.
November 2023. Prof. Xiong gave an invited talk at the 3M corporation Tech Forum on sustainable biobased filters and membranes for pathogen and biofilm control.
September 2023. Prof. Xiong and Ji Qin gave an invited talk at the MN AWWA Annual Conference on Moringa protein-enabled water filters for pathogen inactivation. Congratulations to Ji Qin for being awarded the Advanced Degree Scholarship!
March 2021. Prof. Xiong gave an invited talk at a one day workshop held by CellPress lablinks on Circular plastics economy – linking across scales, with a title "The knowns and unknowns of plastic degradation in the natural environment”. This LabLinks provide a platform for world-leading experts in chemistry, materials science, engineering, industrial ecology, and environmental science to share recent insights and discuss cross-disciplinary opportunities for tackling plastic pollution across scales.
January 2021. Prof. Xiong's first corresponding author article in collaboration with Prof. Ning Dai is accepted into Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology. We investigated the less explored peracetic acid oxidation chemistry in aromatic polyamide nanofiltration membrane and its impact on membrane performance for water reuse applications.
December 2020. Prof. Xiong gave an invited POLYMSE seminar on "Environmental fate of polymers: an example of polyacrylamide and an outlook for plastics” held by graduate students and postdocs at the UMN Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science.
December 2020. We are awarded with the MnDrive Seed Grant and a travel grant supported by NRRI! We have an open postdoc position to work on novel approach to valorizing plastic waste! Advertisement for this position can be seen here.
October 2020. Prof. Xiong gave an invited talk on sustainable water purification at the Saint Francis University, invited by graduate school collaborator and friend Travis Tasker!
October 2020. Prof. Xiong gave an invited talk on strategies for enabling plastic circularity and elimination of end-of-life plastic waste at the 2nd Global Symposium on Waste Plastic held by AlchE.
September 2020. Prof. Xiong co-authored a paper developing a novel vulnerability hydrology model to predict rural areas that are more likely to suffer from groundwater contamination by hydraulic fracturing activities in Northeastern Pennsylvania. This is the first paper of our collaborative EPA project between Yale and MIT. A lot more to come!
September 2020. Prof. Xiong gave an invited lecture on peptide enabled filtration at the WESTalks series, The India-Canada Centre for Innovative Multidisciplinary Partnerships to Accelerate Community Transformation and Sustainability.
August 2020. Xiong Research Lab at UMN is officially open! Welcome Phoebe Keyes (Ph.D.), Daizong Meng (Ph.D.), Sara BA (Postdoc), and Claire Alberg (MS) joining the group! Check out their individual profile here. We also inherit a lab-scale crossflow RO system, a MFP3D-Bio atomic force microscope, and an Anton Paar SurPASS electrokinetic analyzer.
August 2020. Our Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) proposal "Evaluating Coronavirus And Other Microbiological Contamination Of Drinking Water from Wastewater" in collaboration with Profs. Timothy LaPara and Raymond Hozalski is highly recommended for funding!
August 2020. Prof. Xiong introduced our seed project on assessing environmental degradability of plastics at the NSF Center for Sustainable Polymer Seed Grant Recipient Meeting.
July 22nd 2020. First co-authored Nature paper! Prof. Xiong as a postdoc at MIT teamed up with the Johnson Group in MIT Chemistry to show that ultra strong novel thermoset plastics could be degraded under both natural seawater conditions and industrial recycling schemes. This work provides a sustainable option for the least recyclable plastic!
June 22nd 2020. Prof. Xiong gave an invited lecture at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Center for Filtration Research, University of Minnesota.
May 30th 2020. During her last two months of postdoc time at MIT, Prof. Xiong was awarded as CEE Postdoctoral Scholar Mentoring, Teaching, and Excellence Award. In total 7 undergraduate students, 1 high schooler, and 2 graduate students were mentored by Prof. Xiong during the two year postdoc time at MIT. It is quite an honor to be awarded to perform basic responsibility of an academic!
May 18-20th 2020. Prof. Xiong co-chaired the online poster session and poster competition of the online annual meeting of North American Membrane Society 2020. It was a first time ever such format was adopted by annual conference of the membrane community and quite an experiment of the novel online platform. Hope over 600 attendees and near 200 students enjoyed the interaction at the conference!