With an aging infrastructure, the United States faces more scenarios like Flint, Michigan, where high lead levels became a threat to safety. Safa Amiri, a chemistry professor at the University of Florida, has developed a handheld water-quality sensor that detects contaminants with just a few drops of water. Learning to play the violin as a child, Safa says, helped him learn how to persevere. His model was his father, a successful entrepreneur in Iran.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade , who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:38

Water is the stuff of life, but unclean water can lead to death. But the good news is that we have ways to determine what water is safe to drink or use on crops and for animals and what water is not. So today on Radio Cade we welcome Safa Amiri, a professor of chemistry at the University of Florida and the inventor of a new water quality sensor. Welcome Safa .

Safa Amiri: 0:59

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Richard Miles: 1:02

So Safa, obviously clean water is a big deal and people have recognized the scientific basis of that conclusion for about 150 years or so. Um, and there are different ways to measure water , water quality. So describe for our listeners before we get into your background, you know, what makes your invention different? Why is it , uh , better, cheaper, faster than other techniques?

Safa Amiri: 1:27

Sure. So the motivation behind this invention was what I was just seeing in real life in Flint, Michigan. I said that 8,000 children who were affected by lead poisoning, that is, that is like heartbreaking. That is , uh , just because you don't know what you're drinking and just, you just, just imagine, just keep drinking, tap water. And then after a, while you, it out, all of your children are effected or you can't even take a shower with that water. And , um , all of these were because people are just don't know, they just don't know what, what they're drinking, what, you know, what is in their water. And , uh, in several scenarios, even like, you know, they are not informed about it and they have also no knowledge about water chemistry. So it's very heartbreaking that , uh , they don't have a handy tool to test for it. About 45% of the piping infrastructure in the U.S. still is, you know , very too old. And, you know , um , they all contain lead and that causes a lot of issues. About 18 million people are still being suffered by those pipes that are being utilized for the water transportation under the ground. And they all need to be renovated. And it has been shown that if U.S. wants to fix all of these issues, it's going to take about two centuries, fix all of those and the cost of $1 trillion dollars. So they are not going to be fixed easily unless there's a problem. And people do not have a handy tool to do it. So that was the beginning of the alright, so we need to do something about it and let's fix this issue. So I came up with a sensor, water quality sensor, which is a handheld portable, easy to use sensor like cell phone, imagine, and then you just pour a drop of water and it tells you what is in there and how much of that is in there. And then we also be able to, you know, provide solution to our wider commendat