The term interdisciplinary gets thrown about with perhaps excessive ease, but in the case of the work of Emily McGuinness, it’s true.

McGuinness, a postdoctoral fellow at the U of M, was one of only five 2024 winners of the prestigious L’Oréal USA For Women in Science prize. The accolade includes a $60,000 award to support her work.

McGuinness’s dual expertise in textiles and chemical engineering helped lay her research path: forming new, mixed materials intended to keep carbon out of the atmosphere to mitigate global warming. Her winning proposal involves creating hybrid building materials out of polymer fibers and metal oxides to reduce cooling costs.

Commercial and residential cooling accounts for about 10 percent of total energy consumption in the United States. McGuinness’s plan is to merge special polymer fibers with metals that are infused with organic compounds into a single material, which can then be used to make building exteriors that both reflect energy from the sun and deliver heat within a building into deep space. That reduces the need for cooling powered by carbon-burning sources. “We infuse the metal oxides right into the structure of the polymers,” explains McGuinness. “The metal oxide and polymer chains are pretty well intertwined.”

McGuinness has the background to achieve this unlikely amalgam of metal and fiber. As an undergraduate at North Carolina State University, she earned degrees in textile engineering and in chemical and biological engineering, and later obtained her Ph.D. in materials science at Georgia Tech before coming to the U of M in 2022.

“I’m curious about a lot of different areas, and I think I’m at my most creative and engaged when I can combine those in new and interesting ways,” says McGuinness. Vivian Ferry, an associate professor and director of graduate studies in CSE’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and Christopher Ellison, a professor and specialist in polymer research and faculty director of the U of M Industrial Partnership for Research in Interfacial and Materials Engineering (IPRIME), jointly advise McGuinness.

“Vivian is an expert in optics and Chris is an expert in polymer physics and self-assembly,” says McGuinness. “Being at the crossover of those two fields is kind of unique, and it’s channeling my work from the past into one project.”

The one-two punch McGuinness imbues into her new materials—based in passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC), a way of cooling buildings without using energy— depends on two unique qualities of the hybrid stuff. First, the surface of the hybrid is irregular, minimizing the heat absorption of the sun by the skin of the building. “It scatters the light away from the surface of the building, much in the way clouds scatter light,” McGuinness explains.

Next, the materials absorb heat from within the building and convey it outside. “Whatever is creating heat in the building, a person or other heat source, it takes that heat and sends it out,” she says. The hybrid fiber-metal also has the useful quality of radiating infrared heat at very long wavelengths—so long that the rays pass through the Earth’s atmosphere unobstructed into deep space, so there is no increased heating in the atmosphere.

In addition, McGuinness is developing a production technique that will curb the cost and complexity of manufacturing the materials, making the process scalable. “I’m fundamentally curious, and I see opportunities to make the world around us better,” McGuinness says. “I’m motivated to work on problems that are facing us as society, and I love using science within that context to accomplish new goals.”

Chris Quirk is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, New York.

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