15-Year-Old Doctoral Student Engineers Enzymes to Break Down PET Plastic

Ian Emmanuel González Santos, who was told he had an attention deficit in grade school, became the youngest graduate in University of Guadalajara history at 13 and is now a 15-year-old doctoral student researching engineered enzymes to depolymerize PET plastic, building on FAST-PETase work while underscoring that real‑world recycling requires clean, well‑sorted plastics and scalable industrial deployment.