In an interview, Sai Huazheng fondly reminisces about how his journey to Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology began with a serendipitous phone call six years ago. “My wife, Fu Rui, and I were still at the Tsinghua University Chemistry lab when we received a call from a recruiter at Inner Mongolia University, inviting us for a discussion,” he recalls.
In 2018, both Sai and Fu were weighing their options. While prestigious research institutions in big cities seemed appealing, they realized that working at Inner Mongolia University could provide them with greater opportunities to make an impact.
Sai, who had earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science two years earlier, recognizes that accepting the job offer from Inner Mongolia marked a pivotal moment in their lives. After making the decision, they traveled to Inner Mongolia for an interview and were welcomed into the faculty. Sai notes, “Before I officially started, my advisor came to the university to discuss my future. He really wanted me to stay in Beijing.”
Reflecting on his transition from Beijing to Inner Mongolia, Sai credits the support from both the university and college for helping him achieve his dreams over the past six years. The fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019 sparked an idea for him to develop fire-resistant materials. Together with his research team, he extracted silicon and aluminum from coal gangue, a solid waste produced during coal mining, to create new fire-retardant materials.
“The construction of Notre-Dame was primarily wooden. If a fire-resistant coating had been applied to such wooden structures, it could have prevented significant damage,” Sai explains.
As a duo of Ph.D. holders, Sai and Fu established a research group together. In addition to teaching, they worked on green and efficient oil-water separation membrane materials derived from common ingredients found in bubble tea and jelly, offering innovative solutions for addressing global marine oil pollution.
Sai emphasizes the urgency of their research: “With the rapid growth of the petrochemical industry and maritime transport, incidents of oil pollution, including marine oil spills, are increasingly frequent. If oil-water mixtures cannot be effectively separated, it leads not only to resource wastage but also to severe environmental pollution. Membrane separation technology is viewed as an efficient, energy-saving, and cost-effective method for differentiating between oil and water.”
Their growing recognition in the academic sphere has been remarkable—Sai was appointed a professor at 33, while Fu became an associate professor at 34. The couple has also welcomed a new chapter in their family life, with their child now in preschool.
As Sai continues to excel in his field, he recently achieved a significant breakthrough in the area of controlled assembly of sub-nanowires, attracting considerable attention within the academic community.
Sub-nanowires (SNWs) are garnering interest due to their intriguing properties, although creating macroscopic functional materials (like aerogels) from them poses substantial challenges. The conventional methods for producing aerogels are incompatible with the properties of SNWs already reported in literature.
To tackle this issue, Professor Sai proposed a novel approach utilizing a high melting point non-polar solvent—cyclohexane—as a medium for freeze-casting SNW aerogels (SNWAs). The resulting SNWAs not only exhibit a wide range of physical and chemical properties but also hold great potential in photoluminescence applications.
Regarding this complex academic challenge, Sai shares, “Since we made our findings public, we have received ongoing media attention, and you are one of the journalists who have followed our story.”
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