Fuhar Dixit’s passion for his work first developed in his home country of India, where he saw the challenges people faced having access to clean water. His conviction for the need to find solutions deepened during college in Canada, where water contamination issues plagued indigenous communities.
“How individuals in the world can get access to clean water has been an extremely important issue to me from a young age,” Dixit said. “It’s something I’ve always connected with—how can we develop products that can reach the maximum and benefit the most amount of people?”
Dixit is hoping to find more answers at the University of Tennessee as an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Dixit arrived at UT in January and will be a team member of the Precision Health and Environment (PHE) cluster.
Dixit’s research will combine chemical and environmental engineering with AI, mathematics, medicine, nursing, and public health to address challenges affecting humans and the environment.
Joining the UT faculty was an easy decision for Dixit because of the university’s reputation and research capabilities.
“It’s a powerhouse,” he said. “This is one of the most favorable places to do science. The resources are extraordinarily amazing. I do a lot of environmental chemistry work that needs a lot of analytical support for wet lab experiments, and this is a very powerful place for that.”
Finding Practical Solutions for PFAS
Dixit earned his PhD in chemical engineering in 2022 from the University of British Columbia. Before coming to UT, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he managed Department of Defense-funded projects focused on cleaning up sites contaminated by PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), also known as “forever chemicals.”
The pollutants are found at military and airport sites across the country and are extremely difficult to measure with current analytical methods. Dixit’s work is focused on understanding how these chemicals are transported in the environment and improving detection techniques to identify difficult to measure forms of PFAS.
“They have a challenge that you can only measure up to 50 to 60 of these compounds,” Dixit said. “There is more than 12,000 of these structures out there. There is a need to help develop methods that can do a broad-spectrum detection.”
Over the last few years, Dixit has conducted research on pollutants derived from the antioxidants used to protect the life of tires on vehicles. Wherever there are busy highways, the biodiversity in nearby water sources has been shown to be negatively impacted, harming species like salmon or trout.
“A lot of work that I do is also very practical. I try to find and do work in the area that is actually going to be beneficial,” Dixit said. “A lot of work that has been proposed in some of the grants I have already applied for are things I have spoken to actual site managers about to learn what their challenges are and how could we use science to solve these problems.”
Collaborative Approach
A big part of the attraction of working at UT for Dixit was the chance to collaborate with faculty members from other disciplines.
“I get to do something unique, which is not very characteristic of what civil engineers usually do,” he said. “It’s something new, and I am pretty excited about doing interdisciplinary work. I could see myself diversifying in a lot of different angles.”
Dixit is eager to turn good science into real-world impact and develop technologies that not only improve public and environmental health, but also spark innovation, generate jobs, and contribute to long-term prosperity.
“I think the UT System is pretty amazing in the aspect of if you have an idea, how do you scale it up and take it out or spin it out of the university?” Dixit said. “A lot of universities keep their tentacles in when they have their own IPs. This was a very favorable place for giving you more freedom in that sense.”
Badminton Player with a Green Thumb
Dixit has already found a sense of community in the Knoxville area beyond the UT campus. He was a badminton player in college and has joined a club in nearby Farragut.
“It’s one of the sports where you don’t need to depend to too many people to show up to play,” Dixit said. “You just need one more person and you can play.”
Dixit also enjoys gardening and agriculture work. He recently embarked on a road trip with the UT Extension to visit various AgResearch and Education Center locations around the state.
“I surprised a few people in the Agricultural Department by telling them I was able to grow saffron in the Bay Area in California,” Dixit said. “They never knew it could grow there. But I figured out the right variety that could grow in the Bay Area.”
Dixit attended the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings last year, when he spoke on a panel about how science and diplomacy can come together to address shared challenges. At the meetings, he was able to meet Jack Dongarra, an emeritus professor in computer science at UT and former Turing Award winner.
“He was pretty instrumental in helping me come here. He gave me some ideas of why I should be at UT that were very helpful,” Dixit said. “I also recruited people from the meetings to join my lab here, so I’m getting some of the best brains in the world to come and work in the lab here at UT. I can’t wait until we get started.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)