Education
PhD Chemistry, University of Chicago
BS Chemistry, Peking University
Research
Guangxu’s work focuses on engineering bacterium to convert polyolefin waste into value-added chemicals. Present estimates suggest that of the 359 million tons of plastics produced annually worldwide, 150-200 million tons accumulate in landfill or in the natural environment. To recover this plastic waste, particularly polyolefins (the most common plastics in our daily life), Guangxu is developing a chemical-biological hybrid method by first deconstructing polyolefin waste into medium-chain diacids and subsequently selecting and engineering host bacterium to metabolize these diacids and produce value-added chemicals.