News

2026-03-30: Highly Overdue News Updates

Marella and Sam's paper on metals in wildfire suppressants was published in ES&T Letters, named an ACS Editor's Choice article, and covered widely in the press (e.g., NYT, NPR, LA Times).

Dr. McCurry wrote a short perspective for Science on the discovery of chloronitramide ion.

Congrats to Kris Isaacson for starting a faculty position at Cal Poly SLO!

Congrats to Junseok Lee for starting a faculty position at Incheon National University!

Congrats to Marella for completing her PhD and accepting a position at Shimadzu!

Congrats to Euna for completing her PhD and starting a postdoc at Harvard!

Welcome to new postdoc Hanwei Wang! Hanwei joined as part of our newly-funded Superfund center, in collaboration with colleagues in engineering and the school of medicine.

The lab will be moving to EPFL and Eawag in Switzerland as of July 1st, 2026.

2023-11-19: Highly Overdue News Updates

Our paper on nitromethane chloramination kinetics was published in a special issue of ES&T on oxidative water treatment processes

Welcome to new PhD students Haotian Cai, Xiao Yang, and Sanaiya Islam!

Welcome to new postdoc Kris Isaacson!

We received several grants:

-NSF Environmental Engineering GOALI project on vapor gap RO with Tony Straub from CU Boulder

-NSF Environmental Chemistry project on alcohol chlorination with Emily Marron from U. Utah

-DOE NAWI project on 222nm UV treatment with Tony Straub and Karl Linden from CU Boulder

-The USC ReWater Center, funded by US Army Corps of Engineers ERDC CERL

2022-07-27: Highly Overdue News Updates

Congrats to Lily Shi and Sophia Plata for both finishing their PhDs! Lily is now a postdoc at Stanford, and Sophia is a visiting assistant professor at Swarthmore College

Congrats to postdoc Jean Van Buren for accepting a Physical Scientist position at the USEPA in Cincinnati!

Welcome to new PhD student Aarti Visswanathan!

Our first paper on heterogeneous catalysis for contaminant oxidation using dissolved oxygen was published in ES&T, and with collaborators at Eawag we published a review on ozonation of organics in Water Research

Dr. McCurry was interviewed on The Takeaway, a nationally-syndicated NPR show produced by WNYC, about water scarcity, water reuse, and the future of California's water supplies. He narrowly avoided an FCC fine for colorful language while describing de facto reuse

2020-09-03: Summer updates (NSF grant, new members, scholarships)

Dr. McCurry, with collaborators Drs. John Sivey and Keith Reber from Towson University, was awarded an NSF grant from the Division of Chemistry! The grant will support research into environmental halogenation of aromatic compounds such as parabens, which are ubiquitous preservative chemicals and greywater contaminants.