Frontiers in Nanotechnology Seminar Series Presents, 2026 IIN Trailblazer Award winner Jarad Mason

“Transporting Gases in Microporous Water”

Moving gases through water is essential to biological and industrial processes, but most gases dissolve poorly in water. Microporous solids can hold large quantities of gas within networks of tiny pores, yet those pores typically fill with water when placed in an aqueous environment, eliminating their capacity to store gas.

Mason will describe his group’s development of “microporous water,” an aqueous fluid containing microporous nanocrystals whose interiors remain dry. The resulting materials combine high gas capacity with low viscosity and long-term colloidal stability, allowing gases such as oxygen to be stored and transported through water at unusually high concentrations. He will discuss how this approach could address gas-transfer challenges in electrocatalysis, organ preservation, biomanufacturing and medicine.

Get to Know Jarad

(Click HERE for Jarad’s CV)

Jarad Mason is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. His research group combines coordination chemistry, materials science and nanotechnology to create materials for energy, sustainability and medicine. Its work includes porous liquids, self-cooling adsorbents, thermal energy-storage materials and nanocrystal-based frameworks.

Mason earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied gas storage and separation in metal-organic frameworks. He later came to Northwestern as a Dan David Prize and IIN postdoctoral fellow in Chad Mirkin’s laboratory, using DNA to assemble responsive nanoparticle superlattices. He joined the Harvard faculty in 2018.