Brandon Bukowski, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and an associate researcher with the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, was recently named a recipient of the Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program Award. Early Career Awards recognize early-stage scholars with high levels of promise and excellence.
Bukowski’s project, titled “Designing Site Ensembles for Efficient Plastic Upcycling to Fuels,” will support his efforts to fundamentally rethink how plastics are recycled—moving beyond today’s limited and often inefficient methods. Most conventional recycling processes degrade plastics over time, producing lower-quality materials that cannot be reused indefinitely. Bukowski’s research focuses on a more ambitious goal: breaking plastics down into their original molecular building blocks, known as monomers, or even directly transforming them into liquid fuels such as jet fuel or gasoline, so they can be rebuilt into new materials without loss of quality.
“One question is, can we reverse the process—go from the polymer back to the building blocks?” Bukowski said. “If we can do that, we can unmake plastics and create something new, rather than continuously degrading them.”
The research’s implications could be far-reaching—reducing reliance on petroleum-based plastic production and helping create a more circular materials economy. More efficient recycling technologies could reduce plastic pollution, lower manufacturing emissions, and ultimately reshape how everyday products—from packaging to consumer goods—are produced and reused.
Funding from the CAREER Award will primarily support graduate students and computing resources, enabling Bukowski’s team to run complex simulations that model how polymers degrade and how those processes can be controlled.
“This is why I became a professor—to work on hard problems like this,” Bukowski said. “Receiving this award brings a feeling of relief and satisfaction, but also a recognition that there’s a long road ahead for solving these difficult problems in the chemicals industry.”
This article was originally posted by the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute.