On the morning of December 23, 2025, Professor Xiaoguang Duan from the School of Chemical Engineering, University of Adelaide, Australia, was invited to give an academic presentation titled "Design and Application of Single-Atom Catalysts in Advanced Oxidation Technologies" to faculty members and students of our college. The lecture was held in Conference Room E202 of the School of Environment and was attended by more than 40 teachers and students.

Dr. Xiaoguang Duan is currently a Professor at the School of Chemical Engineering, University of Adelaide, Australia. His research focuses on advanced oxidation processes, green catalysis, and functional materials. In recent years, he has published over 170 papers as the corresponding author in journals such as Nature Water, Nature Sustainability, Chemical Reviews, Chemical Society Reviews, Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, Nature Communications, and Environmental Science & Technology, accumulating more than 50,000 citations with an h-index of 124. He has received multiple prestigious awards and grants, including the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA), Future Fellowship, Discovery Projects, and Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grants. From 2018 to 2021, he was consecutively named among the “Top 40 Research Rising Stars” by The Australian Annual Research Magazine. He also received the ACS Catalysis Young Investigator Award, the Environmental Science & Technology James J. Morgan Early Career Award, the Young Tall Poppy Science Award, and the MIT Technology Review “Innovators Under 35” Award. Between 2019 and 2023, he was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate. He currently serves as an editor for journals including Applied Catalysis B: Environmental and Energy, Biochar, and the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering.

In his presentation, Professor Xiaoguang Duan first provided a systematic overview of the challenges posed by emerging contaminants in aquatic environments, including pharmaceutical residues, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and microplastics—trace-level, recalcitrant organic pollutants that pose potential risks to aquatic ecosystems and human health. He emphasized that advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) are effective tools for degrading such contaminants, and that single-atom catalysts (SACs), owing to their maximized atomic utilization and tunable electronic structures, exhibit unique catalytic potential within AOPs.

Professor Duan offered an in-depth analysis of the key obstacles hindering the deployment of single-atom catalysts in AOPs—namely, the precise engineering of active-site architectures, the enhancement of long-term stability, and the scale-up of synthesis protocols. He then spotlighted his group’s innovative work within the peroxymonosulfate (PMS) activation framework. By fabricating Co-SAC catalysts through a controllable adsorption–pyrolysis route, they realized synergistic metal–non-metal catalysis; furthermore, via a multi-dimensional coordination-tuning strategy, they constructed Co1CNCl/S single-atom catalysts co-modified by axial Cl and shell S, which markedly re-engineered the electronic structure and concurrently boosted PMS activation efficiency and pathway selectivity.

During the Q&A session, faculty and students engaged in a lively discussion with Professor Xiaoguang Duan on topics such as characterization techniques for single-atom catalysts, methodologies for investigating catalytic mechanisms, and the prospects for real-world applications in water treatment. This forum focused on the frontiers of environmental catalysis and provided a high-level platform for academic exchange. It not only deepened participants’ understanding of the latest advances in single-atom catalysis for water-pollution control, but also sparked enthusiasm for research into green catalytic materials and innovations in environmental-remediation technologies—an outcome of significant value for promoting high-quality development in the relevant disciplines.