Ruggero Rossi
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Engineering·Early-career
Most crop fertilizers are built on ammonia, and making ammonia the industrial way, through the Haber-Bosch process, takes high heat and pressure. In 2021 that process emitted about 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and used about 2% of the world's energy.
- Fields
Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
Chemistry
- Topics
ammonia production
nitrogen fixation
nitrogen-fixing bacteria
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2031
What they work on
- Uncover the regulatory mechanisms that set how fast nitrogen-fixing bacteria make ammonia under outside electrochemical stimulation, using experiments that link nitrogen fixation to electroactivity (electron exchange with an electrode).
- Build metabolic models, computer models of the cell's chemical reactions, that connect nitrogen fixation, electroactivity and other metabolic functions to explain how and why electrical stimuli boost biological ammonia synthesis.
- Design and build a bioelectrochemical reactor for making ammonia on site, then test it in a high school garden, where trained students will use the ammonia to fertilize plants.
- Improve nitrogenase, the enzyme that turns nitrogen gas into ammonia, by optimizing electron delivery at the anode of a looped zero-gap electrochemical cell, a compact two-electrode design.
- Use metabolic engineering to change the bacteria's regulatory pathways so they make more ammonia and secrete more of it, while carbon dioxide is converted to organic acids at the cathode, and show continuous production in a bench-scale reactor.
More about the research
Some bacteria can do the same job at room temperature. They pull nitrogen gas from the air and turn it into ammonia, a process called nitrogen fixation. But they work slowly and release little of the ammonia they make. Giving these bacteria an electrical push can raise both how much ammonia they make and how much they release. This research combines electrochemistry and microbiology to build small, low-energy reactors that could make fertilizer right on a farm, powered by renewable electricity.
Why it matters
Farmers depend on ammonia fertilizer made in large, fossil-energy-intensive plants. This work could lead to small reactors that make fertilizer on the farm or within a town, using renewable electricity and bacteria instead of high heat and pressure. That could cut carbon dioxide emissions and energy use. It could also give farms more local control over their fertilizer supply.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Karthish Manthiram
California Institute of Technology, CA·Chemistry
Test the hypothesis that breaking the nitrogen triple bond at a titanium(II) catalyst center is the rate-determining step in electrochemical ammonia synthesis driven by alkali metal electron donors.
Arpita Bose
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Microbiology & Immunology
Characterize how a phototrophic bacterium and a methanogenic archaeon grow together as a syntrophic pair, defining the co-metabolic activities each partner contributes under anoxic conditions.
Zhange Feng
University of Nevada-Las Vegas, NV·Chemistry
Gather preliminary data on electrochemical energy storage and electrochemical CO2 reduction, which turns carbon dioxide into other chemicals, as groundwork for a full research center.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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