Dunwei Wang in front of a bench in his lab

Photography by Caitlin Cunningham

It Came from the Lab of Dunwei Wang

One of BC’s most prolific researchers was just named interim director of the Schiller Institute. He’s as committed as ever to making the world a better place by harnessing the power of chemistry.

Dunwei Wang often jokes that if you choose a problem that’s easy to solve, you’ll be out of a job in two years. Luckily, the celebrated chemistry professor and newly appointed Interim Director of the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society has chosen to focus his twenty-year career on some of the biggest challenges facing our planet, pushing the limits of chemistry to unlock new discoveries in clean energy storage, toxic waste recycling, and plastic manufacturing. Originally from China, Wang earned his PhD at Stanford University and completed two years of postdoctoral study at the California Institute of Technology before decamping to the East Coast with his wife, also a researcher at BC. He finds inspiration everywhere, whether it’s outside in nature, at the dinner table with his eleven-year-old son, or in the pages of The New York Times, and delights in interdisciplinary collaboration (he once co-taught a seminar on materialism with an English professor). Many of his projects begin as conversations with student researchers, 110 of whom have passed through his lab during their time at BC and worked alongside Wang to change the world for the better, one molecule at a time. Here’s a closer look at Wang’s many roles and research projects at Boston College.

Overseeing the Schiller Institute

Wang has spent the entirety of his career at Boston College, joining the faculty in 2007 and taking over as chair of the chemistry department in 2019. This past January, he was appointed interim Seidner Family Executive Director of the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, a hub of interdisciplinary research centered around energy, health, and the environment. The Institute, which opened in 2021, offers courses, hosts events, and provides research grants to faculty, with an overarching focus on generating knowledge that serves the common good. 

Wang, who has been involved in the Schiller Institute since its inception, said he identifies strongly with its mission of addressing society’s most pressing challenges. “When I think about scientific research, I always start with the societal impact,” he said. “What are the biggest problems the world faces, and with my expertise, what can I do to contribute?” 

In his new role, Wang hopes to leverage the Schiller Institute’s impressive resources to encourage more faculty and students to collaborate across disciplines. Its state-of-the-art laboratories, for example, could become shared spaces for student researchers in the humanities, STEM, and social sciences, Wang said, leading to the natural cross-pollination of ideas. He’d also like to make the Institute’s seed grant program more valuable to faculty by offering constructive feedback on all research proposals, similar to the peer-review process at academic journals. “The way I see it, the Schiller Institute is a long-term investment,” he said. “I want to get back to its essence, which is the collage of ideas and the honest exchange of thoughts.”

Wang looking at materials in his lab

Solar energy storage

On a clear day, the sun delivers enough energy to the Earth in just one hour to power the planet for an entire year, so why do we remain reliant on fossil fuels to heat our homes, run our appliances, and drive our vehicles? One answer is that while solar panels are effective at capturing the sun’s rays and converting them to electricity, the process of storing that energy for future use remains costly and inefficient. Currently, most homeowners with solar panels sell excess power back to the grid, and rely on nonrenewable energy sources at night or whenever Mother Nature gives us a cloudy day. “It’s unpredictable, and that’s the biggest problem,” Wang said. “We need a solution that can help us smooth out the intermittency of renewable energy.” 

The solution Wang is most excited about is inspired by a process that takes place (for free) right outside our windows. Photosynthesis, taught in every middle school science class, allows plants to convert sunlight into stored energy. Recreating this process in a lab—using abundant materials like iron and silicon—could unlock a future where solar energy produced on the roof of your home is stored on-site in chemical bonds, available whenever you need it. 

Wang’s lab has been working to develop artificial photosynthesis for more than a decade, funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy. The project is hugely ambitious, requiring constant experimentation to create a system that is both effective at harvesting and storing energy and inexpensive enough to produce at scale. “The majority of the time we’re evaluating different options and finding the challenges,” Wang said. “Most of the time it’s failures, that’s just the way of the lab, but my job is to help students see those as part of our success.”

Bacteria that enable lithium-ion battery recycling

They power almost everything around us, from laptops to lawnmowers, but the chemistry that makes lithium-ion batteries so effective is also what makes them so difficult to dispose of. Unlike their alkaline forebears, which can be tossed in the trash, lithium-ion packs contain potentially hazardous heavy metals like nickel, manganese, and cobalt, which can leak out of spent battery casings and into the environment. 

Recycling depleted lithium-ion batteries today requires large amounts of toxic chemicals, but that could change thanks to a recent discovery made by Wang and BC Associate Professor of Biology Babak Momeni. Last fall, the researchers cultivated a new bacterium, called Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans (Atf), that feeds off of spent battery waste, naturally leaching toxic materials from iron or stainless steel casing. “Our results showed that the bacteria can actually thrive with this new food source,” Wang said, “and the resulting solution is highly active for recycling spent batteries.”

Wang and Momeni aren’t stopping there. With help from student researchers, they’re building a prototype battery out of the recycled materials produced by Atf, to see if it functions as well as existing ones. The hope is to eventually develop a pack that can be recycled again and again without sacrificing performance. “It’s all centered around sustainability,” Wang said.

Recyclable single-use plastic

Few materials have received more scorn in the past decade than single-use plastics, most of which take centuries to decompose in landfills and often end up polluting our oceans and communities. But when Wang’s son became passionate about the topic after a class debate in elementary school, Wang found himself playing the unlikely role of plastic-defender. “If you go to a hospital, single-use plastic saves lives,” he explained to his son, also pointing out that plastic wrapping, when used correctly, reduces food waste by preserving perishables. “Kids tend to accept ‘this is bad,’ but like anything, it’s multi-dimensional.” 

Instead of eliminating single-use plastic, Wang wants to chemically alter the material to make it easy to break down and recycle, lessening its environmental impact. Unlike aluminum, a raw material that can be melted down repeatedly, plastics consist of multiple components that can degrade when mixed and are often difficult or costly—if not impossible—to separate, making recycling them a significant challenge. Wang’s team is exploring a solution that involves introducing chemical modifications during the recycling process that bind the components of plastic together in a way that doesn’t compromise their integrity. The team published a proof of concept earlier this year, and while research is still in the early stages, Wang is excited by the potential impact. Plastic—both single- and multi-use—is everywhere in our society, but only about 6 percent of plastic waste is actually recycled. The rest gets tossed in landfills, burned, or shipped to other countries, where it typically meets the same fate.  

“I don’t want to challenge medical professionals or manufacturers, I just wanted to challenge myself,” Wang said. “You give me your waste. Can I develop chemistry that can turn that waste into treasure?”

Wang with Rui Liu working in the lab

Wang in 2012 with Rui Liu MCGS’13, one of the 110 student researchers who have worked in his lab since he joined BC in 2007. Photo: Gary Wayne Gilbert

Recyclable plastic made from wood

As a chemist, Wang will admit to having only one area of expertise: breaking and forming chemical bonds. It’s a skill he applies in a wide range of creative ways, including transforming low-value materials into useful ones. Several years ago, he turned his attention to lignin, one of the most abundant but underutilized byproducts of paper and wood milling. “It accounts for about 30 percent of biomass that’s thrown away,” Wang said, “so we thought, why not find ways to use it?”

Working with Associate Professor of Chemistry Jia Niu, Wang developed a catalyst that uses light to break specific chemical bonds in lignin, converting it into smaller molecules called oligomers. He then combined these oligomers with molecular “glues” known as crosslinkers to create a sustainable plastic that can be continually recycled. (Most of the plastics we use can’t be recycled at all.) Wang and Niu published their findings in ACS Central Science, in an article that has been cited more than forty times. 

Two former lab members are listed as coauthors on the ACS report, including Rong Chen, who pitched the original idea. “We get in debates all the time and it’s one of the parts I love most,” Wang said. “Students come here to learn but it’s really a two-way street—their questions prompt me to think more deeply about my own work, and the meaning of the things we’re doing.” 

A more sustainable fertilizer

Feeding a global population of eight billion would be impossible without fertilizer, which provides plants with nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that enable farmers to double their crop output and keep grocery shelves stocked. Unfortunately, current methods for creating fertilizer are bad for the environment. The process of making ammonia, the central ingredient in most fertilizers, has been around for more than a century, and involves mixing nitrogen from the air with hydrogen derived from natural gas. “It has to be done at 700 degrees, under very high pressure, generating a lot of carbon dioxide,” Wang explained. “The reaction is ingenious but it is not clean.” 

But what if fertilizer could be made in a better way? Chemical synthesis—when two or more chemicals are combined to form a new material—almost always requires heat, but we shouldn’t have to burn fossil fuels to generate it, Wang said, when the sun produces it already, and for free. “In the winter when you go out, the sun makes it feel warm, and the science is not that different,” he said. The heat we feel is caused by tiny particles called photons, which carry electromagnetic energy from the sun to Earth. Wang is working to figure out a method to harness that same energy to drive chemical reactions, like the one that produces ammonia. Doing so could transform the chemical industry. “The chemical plants wouldn’t have to be so large, or have huge chimneys, or burn all that natural gas,” he said. Smaller manufacturing sites could be more widely distributed, reducing the need for transportation. “Right now we use big trucks, eighteen-wheelers, to transport fertilizer from where it’s synthesized,” he said. “That, in and of itself, is a huge waste.” ◽

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