Our professor Alessandro (a theorist, of course) went head-to-head with one of our intrepid experimental grad students in an epic arm-wrestling battle.
The stakes were high – bragging rights, a semester’s supply of coffee, and perhaps the very fabric of scientific understanding!
And the results? Well, this happened…
And at last, the experimentalist was finally defeated, though, in his defense, he is left-handed.
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What do you think was the force multiplier in this victory: rigorous calculation or sheer professorial will? Let us know in the comments! 👇
The Rice STREED team—(left to right)—Alessandro Alabastri, William Schmid, and Sina Nazifi.
A Rice University research team led by Alessandro Alabastri, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, has been named a second-place winner of the 2025 RELX Environmental Challenge.
The team, including graduating doctoral student William Schmid and visiting researcher Sina Nazifi, received $25,000 to further the commercial development of their solar-powered, membrane-less desalination technology.
Addressing Global Water Scarcity
This emerging technology competition is organized by RELX, a multinational provider of information-based analytics and a signatory of the UN Global Compact. Their goal is to advance sustainable, practical solutions for global issues such as water scarcity, sanitation, and health, as outlined in the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Desalination – the process of turning salt water into fresh water — will become increasingly important in the coming decades as climate change and population growth strain limited fresh water sources.
Meet STREED: A Decentralized Solution
The Rice team’s winning invention, Solar Thermal Resonant Energy Exchange Desalination (STREED), is a fully decentralized system designed for communities facing severe water shortages, especially rural, remote, or low-resource areas.
STREED offers a robust alternative to traditional desalination methods, such as reverse osmosis, which can struggle with highly saline or contaminated water and produce large volumes of waste brine. While many emerging solar-driven solutions rely on fragile, expensive membranes, STREED avoids these limitations by using a membrane-free, solar thermal process that recycles heat within the system.
“Large-scale desalination plants require significant energy and infrastructure. Resources that many communities simply don’t have. Our goal was to create a low-cost, decentralized technology that can purify even high-salinity and contaminated water sources with little maintenance.”
— Alessandro Alabastri
How It Works
Built on more than a decade of research through Rice’s NSF Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (now part of the Rice WaTER Institute), STREED uses a resonant energy-transfer method. This allows heat to oscillate efficiently between heated saline water and air carrying water vapor.
By tuning the system to the optimal flow rates, the device recycles thermal energy to produce fresh water day and night, leaving behind solid salt that can be repurposed.
From Research to Real-World Impact
The team presented STREED at Pollutec, Europe’s largest environmental sustainability trade show, gaining visibility and opportunities to connect with industry partners. In addition to the cash award, the team received one year of free access to ScienceDirect, RELX’s scientific research database.
“It is a great honor to be chosen as a winner of the RELX Environmental Challenge. This prize validates our team’s decade-long commitment to sustainability solutions and our dedication to develop a compact, modular, low-maintenance desalination technology.”
— William Schmid
The STREED team aims to form a startup and recently moved to Greentown Labs, the world’s largest climate tech and energy incubator, to advance the commercial development of its technology.
We are incredibly proud to announce that our senior PhD student, Will Schmid, has been awarded the prestigious 2025-26 Chevron Energy Graduate Fellowship!
⚡ About the Fellowship: This competitive award stems from a partnership between the Rice Sustainability Institute and Chevron, designed to nurture future leaders in the energy sector. The program supports graduate students whose research will help drive the transition to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy.
Will is one of only nine students selected from across the School of Engineering and Computing, a testament to his outstanding dedication and innovative research.
The entire lab is thrilled to see your hard work recognized. Congrats, Will! 👏
🔥 A big week for A-Lab! 🔥
We’re proud to share two new publications that highlight the broad scope of our work at the intersection of light, heat, and matter, spanning from ultrafast nanoscopic dynamics to macroscale energy systems.
🔬 At the nanoscale, our study in J. Phys. Chem. C uncovers a counterintuitive phenomenon: electron–phonon temperature inversion in nanostructures under pulsed photoexcitation. These insights are fundamental for controlling energy flows at the femtosecond timescale and optimizing hot-carrier-based technologies.
📄 Link to JPCC paper: https://lnkd.in/dHr_KNwg
🌞 At the macroscale, our Nature Water article introduces STREED — a membrane-free solar thermal desalination system powered by resonant energy transfer (RET). This off-grid solution is dynamically tunable and capable of delivering fresh water under intermittent illumination, enabling decentralized water treatment in resource-limited settings.
📄 Link to Nature Water paper: https://rdcu.be/elZeL
Together, these two papers showcase how we explore photothermal phenomena from fundamental phenomena to real-world impact.
Congrats to all our amazing collaborators!
Congratulations to Andrea and Keith! A great work on modeling how energy is transferred from the electromagnetic field to molecules. Published on ACS Nano:
Congratulations to Dr. Narmada Naidu (now at EPFL) for the excellent work!
Light can be absorbed in nanoparticles to locally generate heat and thermally ablate tumors. We have developed a comprehensive modeling approach for optimizing this Nanoparticle Assisted PhotoThermal Therapy to maximize damage to the tumoral regions while minimizing treatment time and preserving healthy tissues.
Optimization strategies include choosing precise nanoparticle concentrations and adopting specific spatiotemporal modulation of the input illumination.
You can find more information and details in our paper published in ACS Photonics:
It was great to teach with colleagues Prof. Raudel Avila (MECH), Prof. Eleonora Bartoli (Baylor College of Medicine and adj. Rice ECE) and my student Will Schmid the Summer School:
