Fundamental understanding begins at the smallest scale. For chemical engineering researchers like Dorsa Parviz, that means looking beyond a material’s composition and toward how its electrons move, interact and shape behavior at surfaces and interfaces. Understanding the tiny differences on a material’s surface can help explain why electron transfer happens rapidly at some locations on the surface but slows or stalls at others.
Electron transfer occurs when an electron passes from a donor to an acceptor. At the interface where a material meets another substance, this process helps drive chemical reactions central to technologies such as batteries, catalysts and biosensors.
Parviz, an assistant professor in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award to investigate one of the smallest and most consequential movements in science: how electrons move across material surfaces.
The CAREER Award is one of NSF’s most prestigious honors for early-career faculty. It supports researchers who combine promising scholarship with a strong commitment to education to advance both discovery and student training.
Parviz’s project, “From Maps to Mechanisms: Engineering Interfacial Electron Transfer via Nanoscale Electrostatic Landscapes,” focuses on how tiny variations in a material’s structure influence electron behavior.
She says the CAREER Award also gives her the time and stability to develop an ambitious research direction and that the recognition validates the value of connecting ideas across fields rather than staying within a single narrow specialty.
“There are times when you connect several concepts and wonder, ‘Are other scientists going to see that these dots are connected so beautifully? Or is this my own crazy thinking?’” Parviz says. “This award is a validation that there is space for innovative and multidisciplinary thinking.”
Bridging the knowledge band gap
Material interfaces are rarely smooth or uniform, especially at the atomic scale. Surfaces can contain atomic defects, uneven composition, local electric fields and other features that change from one location to the next. Some areas may speed electron transfer, while others may slow it down or block it entirely. For technologies that depend on moving charge efficiently, those differences can matter.
Chemical engineering graduate student Ahmad Asadi says they want to see where electron transfer is active, where bottlenecks form and which local features are responsible.
“We’re trying to characterize what’s happening so that down the line, we can modify the surface and introduce some properties on the surfaces and at interfaces,” Asadi says. “It’s a lot of surface engineering and different kinds of modification to get past the bottleneck of what is currently known.”
To build that understanding, the research team is modeling mixed-metal oxide materials with carefully controlled nanoscale features, mapping the electrical environments across these surfaces, then using probes and single-molecule imaging to visualize how electron transfer varies from place to place.
“We are moving away from averaging bulk measurements and starting to understand all these local variations,” Parviz says. “That would give us control over where these processes of charge transfer are happening efficiently and where the bottlenecks are.”
Parviz is incorporating super-resolution fluorescence microscopy — a technique often associated with biological and cell imaging — to unravel the interdisciplinary mechanisms.
“What was unique about this proposal was the multidisciplinary nature of it,” Parviz says. “It brings advanced experimental and computational tools together at a time when it is possible to move away from the average measurements scientists have relied on for many years.”
Free, radical thinking
The team will compare experimental maps with theoretical predictions and machine learning analysis. When the predicted and observed patterns do not match, those differences may point to hidden mechanisms such as charge trapping, electrostatic screening or transport limitations. Over time, the project aims to create a feedback loop: design a material interface, map its behavior, identify what is controlling electron transfer, then use that knowledge to design the next interface more intentionally.
Parviz notes that the long-term goal is not to develop a single device or product, but rather to learn more about the fundamental principles that enable electron transfer at complex material interfaces. Those insights could support future advances in the design of more efficient materials for applications like carbon capture and conversion, targeted drug delivery, biosensing, plant and agricultural sensing, semiconductor materials and energy storage.
Enakshi Sarkar, a materials science and engineering graduate student in Parviz’s lab, says that understanding these fundamental functions will make it easier to determine the boundaries of material design.
“The field doesn’t fully understand how defects, surface morphology and local coordination environment influence electron transfer at photocatalytic interfaces,” Sarkar says. “Understanding these relationships can help us determine the boundaries of materials design and more intentionally control photocatalytic reactions.”
Pushing out of the outer shell
The grant will also offer Parviz’s team opportunities outside the lab and in the community. They plan to create research-inspired educational kits with local high school teachers to expand access to nanoscale science. The project will also support a vertically integrated mentoring structure in which graduate students mentor undergraduates, undergraduates participate in lab research, and younger students are introduced to ideas that span chemistry, physics, mathematics and chemical engineering.
Parviz says that structure is meant to create a training legacy along with a research outcome. Students will learn about electron transfer by seeing how scientists formulate questions, test ideas and revise models when experiments reveal something unexpected.
Anthony Waas, a professor and school director for the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, says Parviz is tackling a pivotal question in the field.
“Dorsa Parviz is a highly creative and thoughtful investigator whose award turns a difficult, largely invisible problem — how nanoscale surface potential governs electron transfer — into a compelling, experimentally testable design framework,” he says. “The work is ambitious but well grounded, with the potential to reshape how reactive interfaces are understood and engineered for catalysis, sensing and energy conversion.”
