Lanzarini-Lopes Receives NSF CAREER Award for Biofilm Research

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Mariana Lanzarini-Lopes, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in the UMass Amherst Riccio College of Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award to advance new methods for studying and preventing microbial fouling.

The five-year, $709,645 award will support Lanzarini-Lopes’ project, “Bottom-Up UV Approach for Real-Time Investigation and Control of Microbial Fouling at the Attachment Interface.”

Biofilms are thin layers of bacteria that attach to wet surfaces. “If you look down your sink drain and touch the inner side of it — that slimy substance is biofilm,” says Lanzarini-Lopes. These biofilms can create serious problems in hospitals, water systems, ships, and food production facilities, where they can harbor pathogens, reduce efficiency, and damage infrastructure. Current methods for controlling biofilm growth often rely on toxic chemicals, special coatings, or intensive scrubbing. These approaches can be expensive, short-lived, and harmful to the environment. 

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Lanzarini-Lopes’ project will take a different approach by developing surfaces that emit ultraviolet light from within the material itself, preventing bacteria from attaching to the surface in the first place. Her team will use a novel UV-emitting glass to observe how bacteria respond to light at a surface in real time.

The project builds on research already underway in Lanzarini-Lopes’ lab, which created UV-emitting glass that can reduce 98% of biofilm growth on surfaces in underwater environments. 

Her lab focuses on engineering platforms that enhance light transport and reactions for photon-driven water treatment. The work combines basic science and industry-focused applications to create green technologies for water treatment, environmental remediation and other engineered systems.

In this new NSF-funded project, Lanzarini-Lopes and her research team will integrate UV-emitting glass with microfluidic flow cells and high-resolution microscopy to study the earliest stages of microbial attachment. The project will quantify how different levels of ultraviolet irradiance affect bacterial attachment probability, motility, extracellular polymeric substance production and inactivation thresholds.

The team will also use optical coherence tomography imaging to measure biofilm structure in real time, including thickness, porosity, and surface roughness, under different environmental conditions, such as pH, temperature, salinity, flow rate and nutrient concentration.

The research is designed to answer fundamental questions about interactions between light, microorganisms, and surfaces, while also helping scale UV-emitting surface technology to more complex shapes. Potential applications include ship hulls, medical devices, water pipes, water treatment systems and marine equipment.

Lanzarini-Lopes’ earlier work has shown the promise of this approach. In field testing in Port Canaveral, Florida, UV-emitting glass reduced visible biofilm growth by 98% compared with untreated glass. In a follow-up three-month field study, the UV-emitting glass maintained minimal biofouling while control units became completely fouled within two weeks.

The CAREER project also includes educational activities for K-12 students, undergraduate students, and graduate researchers, with the goal of training the next generation of engineers to develop light-based solutions to real-world problems.

“Light has tremendous potential to drive beneficial reactions while replacing toxic chemicals from being released into the environment,” Lanzarini-Lopes said. “By developing better methods to deliver light into complex geometries, our lab is unlocking new possibilities for environmental remediation and engineering applications.”