S&T Foundations is proud to highlight an achievement from our Laboratory University Collaborative (LUCI) community. Dr. Manoj Kolel-Veetil (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, OUSD(R&E) LUCI Fellow) and Prof. Surya Kalidindi (Georgia Institute of Technology, OUSD(R&E) Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow) just found a way to predict which "forever chemicals" can actually be broken down, and which ones can't, in milliseconds instead of hours.
PFAS were engineered in the 1940s to survive heat, acid, and time itself. Today they contaminate soil, drinking water, and human blood across thousands of distinct chemical variants, and until now, figuring out which ones were vulnerable to treatment meant running expensive quantum chemistry simulations one molecule at a time.
Published in Advanced Science, Drs. Kolel-Veetil and Kalidindi's machine learning framework changes that math entirely. It predicts which specific carbon-fluorine bonds are weak enough to break down under treatment and which molecules will resist it altogether, all without a single lab test. A calculation that once took two hours now takes milliseconds, turning a nearly impossible screening problem into a manageable one. It's also a clean example of what LUCI is built to do: pair a DoW laboratory fellow working close to mission need with a VBFF/MURI-funded academic pushing the fundamental science, and let the two accelerate each other.
Read article here: https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202523817
Congratulations to the full team behind this work:
Dr. Manoj Kolel-Veetil, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (OUSD(R&E) LUCI Fellow)
Prof. Surya Kalidindi, Georgia Institute of Technology (OUSD(R&E) Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow)
Pranoy Ray, lead author, Georgia Institute of Technology
Andrew Castillo, Multiscale Technologies Inc.
