New Langford Professor in Chemistry named

Dr. Steve Opoku-Duah is working to bring clean water and ‘living water’ to the globe

There’s a continuously flowing theme throughout the life of Lipscomb’s new Paul B. Langford Endowed Professor in Chemistry Dr. Steve Opoku-Duah: water.

Water was a constant need as he grew up in poverty in Ghana. It became the subject of his study as he fulfilled his mother’s educational dreams for him, and it is the focus of his chemistry research and mission today as he works to develop water filtration systems, including low-cost versions for disadvantaged areas.

For more than 23 years Opoku-Duah has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in chemistry and hydrology in four different countries, published widely in high-impact scientific journals, earned several academic and research grants and fellowships and served as a Christian missionary in Africa, Europe and North America.

His experience is highly fitting to fulfill the role named for Langford, who for nearly half a century inspired and mentored Lipscomb students who dreamed of entering medical professions or pursuing careers in chemistry.

In addition to Opoku-Duah’s new appointment for the 2022-2023 school year, his first book, an autobiography, was released this summer, and he was recognized for his service on an international disciplinebased committee recommending fellowship funding.

These are just the latest achievements in the long journey he began about 50 years ago as an indigent child, heeding his mother’s insistence to focus on God, school and self-control.

As a seven-year-old boy from the ancient Ashanti tribe in the West African country of Ghana, Opoku-Duah walked two miles to the river every morning before school to collect drinking water for the day. The small village where he was born and spent the first 12 years of his life lacked basic water service, a fundamental human need for health and well-being that remains a challenge for 10 percent of the world’s population.

His inspiring journey from an impoverished child to a chemistry scientist is told in his book, Transcended: The Story of an African Science Professor Changing Lives in America.

Dr. Steve Opoku-Duah (left) with Dr. Paul B. Langford (right), the namesake of the new endowed professorship.

“My mother was a very strong Christian who insisted her children always focus on three things: God, school and self-control,” said Opoku-Duah. “Her strict rules changed my life; even though she had no formal education, she knew the value of education. I was determined to go to college.”

His mother, grandmother and six sisters sacrificed much of what little they had to help pay for him, the family’s only male child, to attend a regimental British mission high school in the city. That was where he had access to clean drinking water for the first time in his life and learned from his American Peace Corps biology teacher how dirty water made people sick.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology in Ghana, a master’s degree in water chemistry from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and a Ph.D. with post-doctoral research in environmental hydrology at Durham University in England.

Opoku-Duah has been a Lipscomb faculty member in chemistry since 2019 and currently serves as chair of the Department of Biochemistry & Chemistry. He was the 2022 recipient of the university’s Award for Faculty Excellence in STEM. His research focuses on development of new and cheaper water filtration technologies.

In addition to his administrative duties and his hydrology research, he also works with students on research studies, including a study on the antioxidant and antiviral properties of herbal teas that was published in the Journal of Nutritional Health and Food Engineering. Lipscomb’s Dr. Matt Vergne, associate professor in pharmaceutical science, and students Markous Boushra (‘21) and Matthew Khalil (‘21) were co-authors of the article.

Opoku-Duah, along with a partnering chemical engineer, developed technology that cleans dirty river water using UV lamps, a more feasible solution in Africa. The UV radiation breaks the oxygen into atoms that become very active radicals that kill bacteria and viruses by breaking into the cell wall in the DNA nucleus. Once all of the bacteria and viruses are killed, the water is filtered and clean enough to drink in about an hour.

One recent application was the removal of toxic microsystems released from blue green algae in the drinking water in St. Mary’s Lake in Celina, Ohio. The other was in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where perfluorooctanoic acid, a subtype of a byproduct compound from making Teflon, had been discharged into the Ohio River.

Opoku-Duah has published results of these studies in two journals and has submitted a book chapter on the results of these projects.

He also has a grant proposal pending with the Tennessee Department of Agriculture to study nutrient loads in selected Middle Tennessee rivers and streams using advanced analytical instrumentation. Results would be used to update watershed-based plans and delist recovered streams.

Read more about Dr. Opoku-Duah and purchase his autobiography at bit.ly/Opoku-Duah.