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Membrane Research Lab

We are a lab based in Austin, Texas. Our mission is to develop high performance polymers or polymer-based materials for gas and liquid separations as well as barrier packaging applications.
Dr. Benny Freeman

Benny Freeman

William J. (Bill) Murray, Jr. Endowed Chair of Engineering and Professor of Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

Freeman Group at EER 2024

Personnel

Our group is organized around three broad topics: gas separations, liquid separations, and barrier materials. There are approximately fifteen Ph.D. students in the research group, and our research is supported by a variety of federal, state, industrial sponsors.

polymer

Research

Our research program is largely experimental in nature and focuses on polymers and polymer-based composite materials, with particular emphasis on the fundamentals of transport of small molecules in polymers, which is applied in areas such as gas separation membranes, liquid separation membranes, water purification, and barrier packaging.

News

Student and Postdoc Team Science Award presentation

M-WET Team wins the Team Science Competition at the DOE PI Meeting

Aug. 14, 2025
The M-WET team at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science 2025 EFRC-Hub-CMS-CCS Principal Investigators Meeting won the Student and Postdoc Team Science Award for "Towards Rational Design of Tougher SNIPS Membranes for Water and Energy Systems".
Image of Joshua Moon in laboratory

CAREER Award-winning Joshua Moon comes full circle with NSF

July 8, 2025
Alumnus Joshua Moon "recently won a coveted National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award, the foundation’s premier honor recognizing rising academic leaders. The award will support Moon’s research on membrane-based separation processes and creating new ways to reduce energy consumption through chemical engineering."
Image of Haiqing Lin

Alumnus Haiqing Lin wins the AIChE Institute Award for Industrial Gas Separation

June 13, 2025
Professor Haiqing Lin (SUNY Buffalo) won the AIChE Institute Award for Industrial Gas Separations. Outside of election to the academy, this is about the biggest award someone in the membrane science field could win, certainly anyone working in gas separations using membranes.
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