Adedamola Adenekan: 2025 AJ Birkbeck Scholarship Winner

U-M PhD student studying how a material in toothpaste, face masks can remove PFAS

When an innovative product is created, its cost often makes its use in the world start not as a flood but a trickle. Adedamola Adenekan wants to change that.

Adenekan is studying a family of chemicals as widespread as they are infamous: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. And he is tinkering with a common substance that could remove this pollutant easily and affordably: activated carbon.

If Adenekan can show activated carbon helps remove PFAS in our water, the University of Michigan doctoral student believes the large-scale removal of the so-called “forever chemicals” will not take much time.

“If this works, this is all giving back to the communities,” the aspiring toxicologist said. “We are giving back to people who are not able to afford all this sophisticated equipment to clean their water, their drinking water.”

For his work, the PFAS Alliance and the Michigan Environmental Council have awarded Adenekan the AJ Birkbeck Scholarship, a monetary award given to students at a Michigan college or university completing research or projects around PFAS.

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Filtering out problems

Activated carbon is porous, and this makes it exceptional at adsorping naturally occurring substances, like waste in water and dirt on our face. It is why you see the material, and its alias activated charcoal, in products ranging from fish tank filters to face masks.

Activated carbon can ‘adsorb’ PFAS (meaning PFAS will stick to its surface), it cannot break down PFAS on its own.

PFAS were created to resist. For decades, producers have used their abilities to deflect water, grease, oils and sticky substances from shoes, pots, pans, cosmetics, even firefighting foam.

But these chemicals can also resist breaking down. They last a long time wherever they end up, which is many places. PFAS is now found in waterways, soil samples, fish and even humans. This ubiquity is thanks to the breakdown of products that have PFAS in them and to outright dumping of these chemicals by industries.

Despite PFAS being used for decades, and despite some companies long knowing their dangers, society is still trying to understand their reach and their repercussions. So far, they have been tied to a number of developmental and physical problems in humans.

It is the sort of injustice AJ Birkbeck, whom Adenekan’s scholarship is named after, fought against. He served as an attorney for west Michigan residents concerned about a shoe company’s dumping of PFAS in their community. It helped spark national attention to the chemicals and statewide change.

Global threats, global solutions

So, if activated carbon cannot adsorb PFAS, why is Adenekan studying the relationship between the two?

Enter persulfate, which, if “activated,” as Adenekan put it, is capable of breaking down some members of the PFAS chemical family. Activated carbon can activate persulfate.

At U-M’s School of Public Health labs, Adenekan is studying the various forms and concentrations of activated carbon, using them to power up persulfate. He then applies different types of PFAS to see if the ‘forever chemicals’ degrade.

There are many forms of PFAS removal being studied, but Adenekan believes that the activated carbon-persulfate combination could be the best for a few reasons.

First, it would be accessible. Activated carbon is widely available to people and industry alike, and so is persulfate, which is used as a bleaching agent. This makes the substances’ use against PFAS scalable, from the household level to a water system serving millions of people.

Second, it would be cheap. Adenekan has a bent toward using commercially available versions of activated carbon. The cost of a potential PFAS filter with this carbon could be just a few dollars for one’s kitchen tap.

Third, whereas other PFAS removal methods being studied create waste, Adenekan is working to limit this.

“Growing up, one of the things I really wanted to do was to have an impact on people’s health,” he said. “I didn’t come from plenty, but I would love to give back to people who are at a disadvantage.”

Adenekan said much of his motivation for a pollution removal tool that is affordable, accessible and efficient comes from his upbringing in Nigeria. He said ailments caused from the environment are “invisible” to many citizens until they are acute. They just do not think about them.

This was especially concerning to Adenekan because his home nation does not provide clean drinking water in a systemic way like the United States does. Many people get water on their own, and these sources are often polluted.

These sorts of human-environment interactions are what Adenekan studied and educated others about as he obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Nigeria. It is what also drew him to the toxicology program at U-M.

“This gap between exposure and awareness leads me to an environmental health solution that meets people where they are,” Adenekan said.

Michigan may be the perfect place to make this happen. Adenekan noted that if PFAS can be effectively removed in Michigan, a state with one of the highest rates of PFAS contamination, it can be removed anywhere.