A new material developed by researchers from U of T Engineering could offer a safer alternative to the non-stick chemicals commonly used in cookware and other applications.
The new substance repels both water and grease about as well as standard non-stick coatings — but it contains much lower amounts of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a family of chemicals that have raised environmental and health concerns.
“The research community has been trying to develop safer alternatives to PFAS for a long time,” says Professor Kevin Golovin (MIE), who heads the Durable Repellent Engineered Advanced Materials (DREAM) Laboratory at U of T Engineering.
“The challenge is that while it’s easy to create a substance that will repel water, it’s hard to make one that will also repel oil and grease to the same degree. Scientists had hit an upper limit to the performance of these alternative materials.”
Since its invention in the late 1930s, Teflon — also known as polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE — has become famous for its ability to repel water, oil and grease alike. Teflon is part of a larger family of substances known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
PFAS molecules are made of chains of carbon atoms, each of which is bonded to several fluorine atoms. The inertness of carbon-fluorine bonds is responsible for the non-stick properties of PFAS.
However, this chemical inertness also causes PFAS to resist the normal processes that would break down other organic molecules over time. For this reason, they are sometimes called ‘forever chemicals.’
In addition to their persistence, PFAS are known to accumulate in biological tissues, and their concentrations can become amplified as they travel up the food chain.
Various studies have linked exposure to high levels of PFAS to certain types of cancer, birth defects and other health problems, with the longer chain PFAS generally considered more harmful than the shorter ones.
Despite the risks, the lack of alternatives means that PFAS remain ubiquitous in consumer products: they are widely used not only in cookware, but also in rain-resistant fabrics, food packaging and even in makeup.
“The material we’ve been working with as an alternative to PFAS is called polydimethylsiloxane or PDMS,” says Golovin.
“PDMS is often sold under the name silicone, and depending on how it’s formulated, it can be very biocompatible — in fact it’s often used in devices that are meant to be implanted into the body. But until now, we couldn’t get PDMS to perform quite as well as PFAS.”
To overcome this problem, MIE PhD student Samuel Au developed a new chemistry technique that the team is calling nanoscale fletching. The technique is described in a paper published in Nature Communications.
“Unlike typical silicone, we bond short chains of PDMS to a base material — you can think of them like bristles on a brush,” says Au.
“To improve their ability to repel oil, we have now added in the shortest possible PFAS molecule, consisting of a single carbon with three fluorines on it. We were able to bond about seven of those to the end of each PDMS bristle.
“If you were able to shrink down to the nanometre scale, it would look a bit like the feathers that you see around the back end of an arrow, where it notches to the bow. That’s called fletching, so this is nanoscale fletching.”
Au and the team coated their new material on a piece of fabric, then placed drops of various oils on it to see how well it could repel them. On a scale developed by the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists, the new coating achieved a grade of 6, placing it on par with many standard PFAS-based coatings.
“While we did use a PFAS molecule in this process, it is the shortest possible one and therefore does not bioaccumulate,” says Golovin.
“What we’ve seen in the literature, and even in the regulations, is that it’s the longest-chain PFAS that are getting banned first, with the shorter ones considered much less harmful. Our hybrid material provides the same performance as what had been achieved with long-chain PFAS, but with greatly reduced risk.”
Golovin says that team is open to collaborating with manufacturers of non-stick coatings who might wish to scale up and commercialize the process. In the meantime, they will continue working on even more alternatives.
“The holy grail of this field would be a substance that outperforms Teflon, but with no PFAS at all,” says Golovin.
“We’re not quite there yet, but this is an important step in the right direction.”
Professor Alex Mihailidis (BME) has been named a Chevalier (knight) of the Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Republic, recognizing his distinguished contributions to education, science, and international academic collaboration.
The Ordre des Palmes académiques is one of the oldest civil honours bestowed by the French government, originally established by Napoleon in 1808 to recognize eminent members of the University of Paris. Reformed into its current structure in 1955, the order now honours individuals worldwide for their service to the advancement of education and scholarship. With this award, Mihailidis joins a global community of more than 4,500 knights.
Mihailidis is the associate vice-president for international partnerships at the University of Toronto and the Scientific Director of AGE-WELL, Canada’s technology and aging network. He holds academic appointments in the Department of Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, with a cross-appointment to the Department of Computer Science.
For more than 24 years, Mihailidis has led interdisciplinary research at the intersection of aging, artificial intelligence and assistive technology. His work focuses on developing smart systems to support older adults, including tools for dementia care, fall detection and independent living. He has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed publications and helped build strategic research partnerships between academia and industry. Recently, AGE-WELL has partnered with IKEA and the University of Toronto to launch the Innovation Studio, dedicated to aging-in-place technologies.
In addition to his research, Mihailidis is active in professional and policy circles. He is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America, where he also served as President. In 2022, the United Nations recognized him among the Healthy Ageing 50, a group of global leaders working to improve the lives of seniors.
“Alex’s work exemplifies the impact biomedical engineering can have on society,” says Professor Milos Popovic, Director of BME.
“This recognition from the French government is well-deserved, and we are proud to see his global leadership acknowledged at the highest levels.”
Several members of the University of Toronto community have been recognized with the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honour, in the latest round of appointments and promotions announced June 30, 2025.
Among the 83 individuals, recognized for their sustained and extraordinary contributions to Canada, are BME professor Tom Chau, ECE Professor Emeritus Adel Sedra, and alumnus Nathan Leipciger (ECE 5T5, Hon LLD 2019).
“The work of U of T Engineering professors Tom Chau and Adel Sedra, as well as alumnus Nathan Leipciger, has enriched our communities and our country, by breaking down barriers for children and youth, and inspiring future generations,” says U of T Engineering Dean Christopher Yip.
“On behalf of the faculty, heartfelt congratulations on receiving one of the nation’s most distinguished honours.”
Chau has been named an Officer of the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest civilian honours. Appointment as an Officer recognizes achievement and merit of a high degree, especially service to Canada or to humanity at large.
Chau is a senior scientist at Bloorview Research Institute, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, and a professor in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering. His lab discovers, designs and evaluates novel pathways through which people can communicate and interact with their environment in the absence of speech and gestures.
Chau’s work has creatively leveraged emerging methods at the intersection of electrical engineering, machine learning and neuroscience to directly tackle the physical inability to communicate. He is a lead inventor of more than a dozen patents on medical and assistive devices, which have given children and youth with disabilities the ability to communicate independently for the first time.
For example, Chau developed the Hummingbird, a device which detects intentional vibration of the vocal cords and converts these vibrations into digital signals to allow those who are non-verbal to communicate through technology. In addition, his award-winning Virtual Music Instrument has provided unprecedented bedside access to music and music therapy.
For individuals entirely without motor control, Chau’s team developed near-infrared spectroscopic brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which can decode preferences, emotional state, mental arithmetic, music imagery and language tasks, simply by monitoring brain activity.
His lab proposed the first ever ultrasonic BCI, facilitating typing with mental activity alone. He also published the first auditory-tactile BCI, affording communication to children with severe impairments who have no functional vision, a challenge that eluded clinicians and scientists for decades.
In 2018, Chau received a Governor General’s Innovation Award and was appointed to the Order of Ontario. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023.
Sedra, former U of T vice-president and provost and chair of what is now the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, was appointed an Officer for his academic leadership and influential work on microelectronics and circuits.
He received a BSc degree from Cairo University, Egypt, in 1964, and his MASc and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto in 1968 and 1969 respectively. He joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1969, rising to the rank of Professor in 1978.
With the late Professor Emeritus K.C. Smith (ECE), Sedra co-authored Microelectronic Circuits, the best-selling engineering textbook first published in 1982. It is a classic of its genre, receiving widespread praise for the richness of its problems and the expressiveness of its prose. To date, the book has gone through eight editions, sold more than a million copies and been translated into nearly a dozen different languages.
A permanent exhibition at U of T’s Myhal Centre holds several editions and translations of Microelectronic Circuits, along with other memorabilia celebrating the legacy of the textbook.
He joined University of Waterloo in 2003 as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Leipciger, who earned a degree in electrical engineering from U of T in 1955 and received an honorary degree in 2019, was named a Member of the Order of Canada for his decades of Holocaust education efforts.
A dedicated educator with the March of the Living for more than 30 years, he has mentored thousands of students on the dangers of bigotry and intolerance, and has inspired thousands more with his personal story of resilience, love and forgiveness.
Born in Poland in 1928, Leipciger endured three months in the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp as a teenager — losing his mother and sister. He and his father Jack were also sent to numerous other concentration camps before the war ended in 1945.
The pair immigrated to Toronto in 1948, where the younger Leipciger attended high school before going on to earn his degree from U of T. He soon forged a successful career, founding a consulting engineering firm in 1962, until it was sold to Quebec engineering giant SNC-Lavalin in 2007.
He also served on the board of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland for many years, guiding scores of people – from high school students to world leaders like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – through the museum and former concentration camp site.
In recent years, he has also collaborated with Indigenous leaders and survivors of Canadian residential schools to highlight the common threads that run through systemic oppression and genocide, and to urge audiences to practice acceptance and respect.
Each year, researchers around the world create thousands of new materials — but many of them never reach their full potential. A new AI tool from U of T Engineering could change that by predicting how a new material could best be used, right from the moment it’s made.
In a study published in Nature Communications, a team led by Professor Seyed Mohamad Moosavi (ChemE) introduces a multimodal AI tool that can predict how well a new material might perform in the real world.
The system focuses on a class of porous materials known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Moosavi says that last year alone, materials scientists created more than 5,000 different types of MOFs, which have tunable properties that lead to a wide range of potential applications.
For example, MOFs can be used to separate CO2 from other gases in a waste stream, preventing the carbon from reaching the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. They can also be used to deliver drugs to particular areas of the body, or to add new functions to advanced electronic devices.
According to Moosavi, one major challenge facing the field is that a MOF created for one purpose often turns out to have the ideal properties for a completely different application.
For example, in one of their previous studies, it was found that a material originally synthesized for photocatalysis was instead very effective for carbon capture — but this discovery was only made seven years later.
“In materials discovery, the typical question is, ‘What is the best material for this application?’” says Moosavi.
“We flipped the question and asked, ‘What’s the best application for this new material?’ With so many materials made every day, we want to shift the focus from ‘what material do we make next’ to ‘what evaluation should we do next.’”
This approach aims to reduce the time lag between discovery and deployment of MOFs.
To help make this possible, ChemE PhD student Sartaaj Khan developed a multimodal machine learning system trained on various types of data typically available immediately after synthesis — specifically, the precursor chemicals used to make the material, and its powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) pattern.
“Multimodality matters,” says Khan. “Just as humans use different senses — such as vision and language — to understand the world, combining different types of material data gives our model a more complete picture.”
The AI system uses a multimodal pretraining strategy to gain insights into a material’s geometry and chemical environment, enabling it to make accurate property predictions without needing post-synthesis structural characterization.
This can speed up the discovery process and help researchers recognize promising materials before they’re overlooked or shelved.
To test the model, the team conducted a ‘time-travel’ experiment. They trained the AI on material data available before 2017 and asked it to evaluate materials synthesized after that date.
The system successfully flagged several materials — originally developed for other purposes — as strong candidates for carbon capture. Some of those are now undergoing experimental validation in collaboration with the National Research Council of Canada.
Looking ahead, Moosavi plans to integrate the AI into the self-driving laboratories (SDLs) at U of T’s Acceleration Consortium, a global hub for automated materials discovery.
“SDLs automate the process of designing, synthesizing and testing new materials,” he says.
“When one lab creates a new material, our system could evaluate it — and potentially reroute it to another lab better equipped to assess its full potential. That kind of seamless inter-lab coordination could accelerate materials discovery.”
A new paper by Professor Isabelle Rao in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE) uses mathematical modelling to show the impact of providing stable housing to people experiencing homelessness and opioid addiction.
The paper published in JAMA Network Open shows that a ‘housing first’ approach to treating homelessness and addiction can minimize the likelihood of fatal overdoses and decrease healthcare costs.
“Homelessness, substance abuse disorders and a disconnect from healthcare services are all intertwined,” says Rao, who joined MIE in 2024. “For example, homelessness increases the likelihood of developing an addiction, while addiction increases the likelihood of losing housing options.”
Approaches to treating these interrelated issues typically fall into two general categories: housing first and treatment first. Housing first emphasizes providing permanent housing as quickly as possible, with other supportive services following afterward, while treatment first advocates for the opposite.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, opioid use spiked and fentanyl became a leading cause of overdose deaths. This motivated Rao and her former advisor, Professor Margaret Brandeau of the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford University, to create a dynamic mathematical model that incorporated housing, a key social determinant of health, into the analysis of the opioid epidemic.
The model simulated treatment and health outcomes for 1,000 unhoused people with opioid addiction, with and without the provision of stable housing. The model encompassed men and women over a range of ages, projected overdoses and deaths over five years, as well as lifetime healthcare and housing costs, and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs).
The results of their simulations demonstrated that investing in stable housing for marginalized populations was cost-effective, improved health outcomes, increased entry into and retention in addiction treatment, and saved lives.
“The most successful outcome in our analysis came when stable housing was provided,” says Rao. “This improved addiction treatment success and reduced mortality rates among individuals who had experienced homelessness.”
The team found that implementing the housing intervention reduced total overdoses and fatal overdoses over the five years by 11% and 9% respectively. The housing intervention costs $96,000 USD per person and increases QALYs by 3.59, leading to an incremental cost of $26,800 USD per QALY gained compared to the scenario with no housing. Accounting for savings in criminal justice system costs that accrue when individuals are no longer homeless, such housing programs may even be cost-saving.
“The results from the mathematical modelling demonstrate that providing stable housing is both life-saving and cost-effective,” says Rao. “This study has the potential to help inform local policies for funding and demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of Housing First programs.”
Rao and Brandeau have engaged with officials in California’s Santa Clara County, where Stanford University is located, to inform policies around homelessness.
They are also looking to do outreach with other local health communities, and expand into Toronto, and are currently seeking funding opportunities from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“I have always been invested in having an impact on policies to improve the lives of marginalized communities,” says Rao. “My engineering and mathematical background allows me to use modelling to inform critical decisions in public health. It’s very motivating to see the positive and long-term healthcare and personal care impacts that stable housing can provide to people experiencing homelessness.”
Professors Craig Simmons (MIE, BME) and Julie Audet (BME), in collaboration with boutIQ solutions Inc., a University of Toronto spinout company specializing in AI-driven media optimization, has been awarded a $421,000 research grant through the Stem Cell Network’s 2025 Research Funding Competition. The award will support a collaborative initiative with the Acceleration Consortium and University Health Network to enhance stem cell-derived therapies for heart repair, with boutIQ contributing its proprietary AI-powered platform to improve the maturation and function of therapeutic cells.
Founded by professors Simmons and Audet, with clinician-scientist Neal Callaghan (BME PhD 2T1) and researchers Heta Lad (BME PhD 2T4), Doris Adao (BME PhD student), and Alice Feng (BME MASc student), boutIQ solutions aims to transform the way cell culture media is developed. The company uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to design complex, chemically-defined media that accelerates cell growth and boosts physiological performance. This is an essential step for making cell-based therapies more effective and clinically viable.
“We wanted to start this company because our platform can dramatically reduce the time and cost associated with the development of cell manufacturing processes,” says Audet.
“This is often a critical bottleneck not only for cardiac cell therapy but for many other cell-based biotechnologies as they are often struggling to address stringent and extremely complex cell culture requirements.”
With support from the Stem Cell Network, boutIQ will partner with Professors Milica Radisic (BME), Michael Laflamme of the University Health Network, and Yimu Zhao (BME PhD 1T6) at the Acceleration Consortium, to apply its technology to cardiac regenerative medicine. The goal is to develop optimized media that improves the function and maturity of heart cells derived from stem cells, helping them integrate more effectively into damaged heart tissue.
The company’s recent success builds on its growing reputation in Canada’s biotechnology sector. Earlier this year, boutIQ solutions was named the 2025 BBTV Grand Prize Winner at the Building a Biotech Venture Pitch Competition, for its AI/ML-powered approach to media development for regenerative medicine, biotechnology and cellular agriculture. The award included $25,000 in research funding from PRiME and Medicine by Design, a $5,000 BioHubNet VentureConnect Travel Award, a prize package from STEMCELL Technologies, including product support and training, and a one-on-one mentorship session with the Creative Destruction Lab.
“The U of T partnership allows us to apply our media optimization tools to cutting-edge stem cell research,” says Lad.
“It’s an important milestone for boutIQ as we grow our portfolio and continue refining our platform to support more predictive, scalable cell manufacturing.”