Susie Dai doesn’t like to waste time, something obvious as she translates Emily Dickinson poems from English to her native Chinese while waiting for an oil change. She would much rather prefer to be doing research.
“You cannot write a paper or a grant [in a waiting room lobby],” she explains about why she resorts to her hobbies.
Dai gets bored easily, so she keeps busy in any way she can, a trait that attracted her into research. It’s about the art of asking new questions, something that will serve her well as one of the newest principal investigators at Bond Life Science Center at Mizzou.
When asked about how she spends her free time, she replied “I think about the projects.”
Dai’s main focus is converting wasted carbon materials — like agricultural residues and greenhouse gas carbon dioxide — into a useful product. She said the goal is to get high-value products out of carbon waste with microbiological tactics, hopefully contributing to society as a result.
By making old and wasteful carbon materials anew, “you can be rich,” Dai joked, especially due to the carbon cycle on earth, and its multitude of uses across organisms. “Carbon is the vein of the economy.”
Dai has also spent her career studying the health risks of chemical exposure and working with government agency regulation compliance programs. With experience working across state and government entities, she melds fundamental chemistry and biology with applications in the engineering realm. Being a chemist by training but an engineer by craft has its advantages.
“Not only do you ask new questions, but you can find new applications of your technology,” she said. “You use traditional scientific logic to answer the question for new phenomena.”
Prior to touching down at Mizzou, Dai spent three years at the University of Iowa’s State Hygienic Laboratory — the state’s environmental and public health laboratory — and worked for 16 years across various professorships at Texas A&M University.
Dai moved from Texas to Iowa, then from Iowa to Texas again. Finally, she migrated from Iowa to Missouri. She is interested in applying her science to new populations and problems in every new place she lands.
She focuses on three areas in her research: discovering how to turn a product’s waste into valuable material, assessing manufactured products and how to implement the sustainable research across communities and finally applying her study findings to outreach.
Dai’s research also lasers in on agricultural waste like the stalks left after fall harvest.
If one wandered in a cornfield they would be surrounded by lignin, an organic biopolymer that supports plants in their cell walls. contained in the very residues of the crops. Dai’s research mission is to find a new purpose for this underutilized material.
Dai uses electrocatalysis in her lab, a process that utilizes electric current to expedite chemical reactions, to shape-shift a simple carbon into a more complex molecule like a substrate, like acetate or ethanol, for an organism’s food. The substrate is used for fermentation.
She said that using the wasted carbon dioxide as a fuel for microorganisms makes her research novel.
“You would combine science and engineering together,” she said, “so, you can do the best applied research.”
Come meet Susie 10 a.m., April 7, 2025, in Bond LSC’s Room 107. She will speak at Saturday Morning Science, discussing mushrooms and fungi and their sustainable potential.