I just came back from beautiful Cancun where I attended for the third time the IMRC conference invited by my good friend and awesome collaborator Dr. Eddie López-Honorato, who once again pulled off the organization of a wonderful symposium on materials with environmental applications.

Dr. López-Honorato and I have been working for a number of years now on the design application of various kinds of materials that can eliminate arsenic species from drinking water supplies, an ever present problem in northern Mexico in South West US. So far we have successfully explored the idea of using calix[n]arenes hosts for various arsenic (V) oxides and their derivatives, but now his group has been thoroughly exploring the use of graphene and graphene oxide (GO) to perform the task.

Our joint work is a wonderful example of what theory and experiment and achieve when working hand-in-hand. During this invited talk I had the opportunity to speak about the modeling side of graphene oxide, in which we’ve been able to rationalize why polar solvents seem to be -counterintuitively- more efficient than non-polar solvents to exfoliate graphene sheets from graphite through attrition milling, as well as to understand the electronic mechanism by which UV light radiation degrades GO without significantly diminishing there arsenic-adsorbing properties. All these results are part of an upcoming paper so more details will come ahead.

Thanks to Dr. Eddie López for his invitation and the opportunity provided to meet old friends and make new ones within the wonderful world of scientific collaborations.

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