Dr. Robert Hurt

Professor of Engineering at Brown University

Philip Demokritou

Robert Hurt is a Professor of Engineering at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and Director of Brown’s NIEHS-supported Superfund Research Program Center.  He received degrees from Michigan Technological University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and before coming to Brown held posts in central R&D at Bayer AG in Leverkusen, Germany and at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California.  He was the founding Director of Brown’s materials and nanosciences institute, IMNI, and served for eleven years as Editor of the scientific journal Carbon including five years in the Editor-in-Chief role from 2013-2018.  He was a scientific founder of the start-up venture Banyan Sciences and a visiting Professor at the University of Sydney (2002).  He currently serves on the external advisory committee for the Harvard-NIEHS Nanosafety Center.  His research interests include environmental nanotechnology, nanosafety, carbon materials, 2D materials, and the chemistry of the nano-bio interface. 

The Hurt laboratory is recognized for developing materials-based technological solutions to challenges in environmental and human health protection.  The group is currently developing graphene-based technologies for environmental sampling, personal chemical protection, and mosquito bite prevention in smart fabrics. The laboratory also studies the fundamental chemical behavior of materials in biological and environmental systems as underlying drivers of biological response, and initiating events for toxicity pathways.  The group has worked in close collaboration with the Agnes Kane laboratory at Brown to understand how 1D fibrous and atomically-thin 2D sheet-like materials interact with cells and cellular substructures.   Professor Hurt has published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles in journals that include Nature Nanotechnology, ACS Nano, and PNAS, holds three patents and has a personal H-factor of 64.  The publications include receive over 1500 citations annually.  The laboratory’s research has received significant federal financial support in single PI and block grants from the NIEHS, NSF, EPA, EPRI, DoE, and DoD SERDP program.

Robert Hurt was Technical Program Chair for the International Carbon Conference in 2004, and for the past 15 years has served on the International Advisory Committees for the annual carbon conference series.  He served as Divisional Program Chair for the American Chemical Society in 2006, and as Graffin Lecturer of the American Carbon Society.  In 2019, he organized a workshop on 2D Materials for Human Health and the Environment at the annual SNO meeting, and is hosting the 2020 Meeting of Northeast SRP Centers.   His awards include the Silver Medal of the Combustion Institute (1996) an NSF CAREER Award from CBET (1996), Tau Beta Pi Dedicated Faculty Award at Brown (2010), the 2017 Graphene Award of the IAAM in Stockholm, and the Charles E. Pettinos Award of the American Carbon Society (2013).