Dr. Mohammad Arjmand, Researcher of the Year recipient in Natural Sciences and Engineering, is engineering next-gen materials to solve global challenges and build a more sustainable circular economy.
Mohammad Arjmand takes a dual approach to creating a better world
Researchers often choose to specialize in a specific area of study. Mohammad Arjmand, Assistant Professor in UBCO’s School of Engineering, has chosen two.
A former Canada Research Chair in Advanced Materials and Polymer Engineering, Dr. Arjmand is also an Inductee of the Royal Society of Canada, the lead of the Plastic Recycling Research Excellence Cluster and, most recently, the 2025 UBC Okanagan Natural Sciences and Engineering Researcher of the Year.
As a leader in the fields of both polymer engineering (the science of reshaping and repurposing plastics from our daily lives) and nanotechnology (the science of manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular level), he’s combining his unique knowledge of two distinct but complementary fields to help solve global challenges and ultimately build a better future.
Repurposing plastic waste
In Canada, 79 per cent of plastic waste ends up in landfills. Twelve per cent is incinerated when landfills aren’t an option or the waste is difficult to recycle. Only a mere nine per cent is actually recycled.
“What’s happening currently, in terms of plastic waste, is just not sustainable,” says Dr. Arjmand.
His lab is researching ways to fundamentally change polymers—plastics from our daily life— and recreate them in new forms for different applications. The work is called polymer processing and uses various techniques to melt, shape and reconstitute new polymer structures for a variety of desired purposes.
“In many ways, plastics are actually the preferred choice versus other materials, like metal,” he says. “They’re lighter, cheaper, easier to process, and they don’t corrode.”
The challenge in replacing metal with plastic is plastic’s physical properties aren’t as desirable, so Dr. Arjmand looks for ways to improve it. Often, he adds reinforcing agents, making what are called polymer composites.
“We look to advance the physical properties of plastics to make them even more robust, to mimic metal’s properties while maintaining all the benefits of a plastic,” he says.
For a time, the work was done solely with virgin plastic—new polymers that the lab purchased as small beads they would melt and reconstitute into a new form. But now, he’s incorporating plastic waste when possible, processing it into new polymer composites, which serves as a partial solution to a serious problem.
“Canada is behind other countries in plastic recycling,” says Dr. Arjmand. “Municipalities collect it, but it’s many different types of plastic, so we need separation capabilities to sort it into like-kinds for recycling, which is hard on a large scale. This is why so much is sent to the landfill.”
Dr. Arjmand’s research helps save space in the landfill, improves our environment and ultimately ensures a more sustainable future.
“Until we get away from single use plastic, we’ll continue to make waste,” he says. “I’m glad to help find a partial solution.”
But excess waste isn’t the only problem he and his lab are helping solve. That’s where his second specialty comes into play.
Nanotechnology
In the simplest terms, nanotechnology is the science of extraordinarily small things. More specifically, it’s a science that deals with any material with at least one dimension in the range of one to 100 nanometres. How small is a nanometre?
“It’s pretty tiny,” chuckles Dr. Arjmand. “It’s literally one-billionth of a metre.”
Putting it in perspective, a tennis ball is 203 million nanometers in circumference. A human hair is 80,000 nanometres thick. Even a single strand of human DNA, far too small to be seen with the naked eye, is 2.5 nanometres in diameter.
And one nanometre? It’s about as long as your fingernail grows in one second.
Materials at this scale are called nanomaterials, and they provide endless problem-solving possibilities. Dr. Arjmand works with a nanomaterial called graphene. At 0.34 nanometres thick, it’s the thinnest material to ever exist. It’s made from a single chunk of graphite, like you would find in a pencil.
“Imagine a 10,000-page textbook,” says Dr. Arjmand. “If the book is graphite, each page is graphene. If you separate each page and lay them flat, it’s an enormous surface area compared to the complete textbook. Nanomaterials are important because they offer that huge surface area, which provides the opportunity to use them for many applications.”
His lab is working to create nanomaterials with a variety of functions and adding them to the processed polymers, not only to help reinforce the plastics, but to give them a whole new set of properties.
“Plastic is an insulator, but we can add electrically conductive nanomaterial and create plastic that conducts electricity,” says Dr. Arjmand. “The benefits of a plastic, combined with those of a metal—the best of both worlds.”
He’s also added nanotechnology to polymers to make them capable of shielding sensitive equipment from electromagnetic interference.
“On planes, we turn off our phones because they can interfere with communications between the airport and pilot. Hospitals have to protect sensitive, sometimes life-saving equipment. And there are defense applications, where it could protect from an enemy sending electromagnetic waves to jam equipment.”
Sensitive equipment has shielding, but it is commonly metal. While it protects the equipment, the shields are heavy, expensive and hard to process. And there’s another problem.
“Whatever comes to their surface is reflected back,” says Dr. Arjmand. “So the secondary reflection is still in the environment, still capable of causing trouble. If a radar had sent a signal looking to detect a piece of equipment, that signal would also bounce back, and the equipment would easily be found.”
His latest work is endeavouring to develop absorption-based structures.
“We want to generate structures that absorb everything sent their way. Nothing is reflected as secondary pollution and nothing gets through to electronics behind the shield.”
It’s how stealth bombers stay invisible to radar, and a technology for which he sees huge potential.
Looking ahead
Dr. Arjmand says he’s happy to be conducting research with relevant applications and pleased to be doing it with the world-class experts on his team. He sees nothing but good things in the future.
“We’re doing great things. We’ll continue doing great things,” he says. “We have a nourishing and thriving environment at UBCO and I hope even more researchers are clamouring to come here, to do this work, to help society and the world.”