Assistant Professor
Biography
In 2012, Marcus Foston became a professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
He completed his postdoctoral fellowship under the guidance of Dr. Ragauskas, Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Alternative Energy, in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Research
Professor Foston’s research objective is to create a top tier, world recognized research program in the research and education of the innovative utilization of biomass resources for fuel and chemical production.
A more recent research interest is the development of renewable synthetic polymers derived from biomass feedstocks, inspired by existing polymer systems for specific energy, electronic, biomedical, and high-performance applications, along with new systems to analyze those materials.
Selected Publications
Self-similar multiscale structure of lignin revealed by neutron scattering and molecular dynamics simulation, Physical Review E: Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics (2011), 83(6), 061911/1-061911/4; Petridis, L.; Pingali, V.; Urban, V.; Heller, W.; O'Neil, H.; Foston, M.; Ragauskas, A.; Smith, J.
Biomass Characterization of Morphological Portions of Alamo Switchgrass, J. Agric. Food Chem., (2011), 59(14), 7765–7772; Hu, Z.; Foston, M.; Ragauskas, A.J.
Comparative studies on hydrothermal pretreatment and enzymatic saccharification of leaves and internodes of alamo switchgrass, Bioresource Technology (2011), 102(14), 7224-7228; Hu, Z.; Foston, M.; Ragauskas, A.J.
Selected Research