“Zwitterionic” might not be a word you come across every day, but for Professor Patrick Doyle of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, it’s a word that’s central to the technology his group is developing to remove micropollutants from water. Derived from the German word “zwitter,” meaning “hybrid,” “zwitterionic” molecules are those with an equal number of positive and negative charges. Devashish Gokhale, a PhD student in Doyle’s lab, uses the example of a magnet to describe zwitterionic materials. “On a magnet, you have a north pole and a south…
