News MIT J-WAFS announces the award of eight new grants in sixth round of seed funding

Ten Principal Investigators from eight MIT departments and labs will receive grants of up to $145,000 for two years, overhead free, for innovative research on global food and water challenges.

Andi Sutton Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab June 17, 2020

The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced today its sixth round of seed grant funding to the MIT community. J-WAFS’ flagship funding initiative, the seed grant program is aimed at catalyzing innovative research across the Institute that can improve the world’s water and food supply.

Water and food systems challenges are inspiring a growing number of faculty across the Institute to pursue solutions-oriented research. Over 150 MIT faculty members from across all five schools at MIT as well as the Schwarzman College of Computing have submitted proposals to J-WAFS’ grant programs since its launch in 2015. In 2020 alone, 34 principal investigators from fifteen departments across all five schools proposed to the J-WAFS seed grant program. These numbers represent an impressive cohort of MIT faculty members committed to applying their knowledge and resources toward ensuring the safety and sustainability of the world’s water and food resources.

“Today, innovation in all sectors is needed to ensure that current and future populations have reliable access to clean water and nutritious food. Our rapidly expanding cities demand more resources than local ecological systems can support. Our industries and dwellings still contaminate our water and land. The intensifying climate crisis is straining the existing infrastructure, food production systems, and water resources upon which we depend. And yet, researchers across the MIT community are responding to the urgent need for solutions in these areas with creativity and exceptional knowledge and skill,” says J-WAFS’ director John H. Lienhard V, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering. “It is truly inspiring.”

This year, J-WAFS will fund eight new projects led by ten principal investigators. These projects will be supported by two-year grants of up to $145,000, overhead free. The ten funded individuals hold appointments in eight MIT DLCs: the Departments of Biological Engineering, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Economics, Mechanical Engineering, and Urban Studies and Planning, as well as the Center for Environmental Health Sciences.

Improving Drinking Water Access Equitably and Sustainably

Urban households across the United States—and the water departments that serve them—are under tremendous financial pressure to maintain access to safe drinking water. Diminished federal support for water infrastructure investments and stagnant state-level subsidies have resulted in municipal water departments raising water rates. This pattern, which has grown over the last decade, has caused a growing water poverty cycle in cities across the US, where poor urban households experience water shut-offs that often end with home foreclosures. A J-WAFS seed grant will support two professors in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Gabriella Carolini, Associate Professor of International Development and Urban Planning, and Lawrence Susskind, Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, to examine local-level policy responses to urban water poverty through ten case studies. These case studies will inform the development of online dashboards, for both municipal water utilities and for residents and their advocates. Aimed at reversing the water poverty cycle, these new resources will give stakeholders a way to assess where their neighborhood and city stand with regard to water poverty and help decision makers envision productive policy solutions.

Researchers across a variety of disciplines are looking for new ways to address ever-increasing water scarcity around the globe, especially in decentralized communities and arid regions. Developing technologies that harvest water from air has emerged as a promising strategy. Existing versions typically rely on water adsorption using a various materials such as hydrogels and salts. Unfortunately, these strategies tend to be slow-producing and low-yielding, which limits the potential of these devices to scale up to satisfy growing water needs sustainably. Xyanhe Zhao, Noyce Career Development Professor, and Gang Chen, Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering, both in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, have teamed up to find a solution. They aim to design a smart porous hydrogel to serve as a cost-effective and energy-efficient water harvesting device that is faster and more effective at water recycling than existing technologies.

Sustainable Approaches to Agricultural Productivity

Recent advances in plant bioengineering have produced crops—including corn, soybeans, and cotton—that can metab¬olize phosphite, a reduced phosphorus compound that is not able to be metabolized by non-engineered plants including weeds. This development presents the possibility of using phosphite as both a fertilizer and an approach to weed control. In addition to reducing the negative environmental impact of herbicide use, a strategy built around phosphite fertilizer might address other downsides of excessive use of phosphorus, a nonrenewable resource that is often over-applied.

The challenge, however, is that current industrial processes used to develop phosphite are energy intensive, involve mining practices that disrupt land ecosystems, and result in high carbon emissions. Christopher Cummins, Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry is seeking a solution. His research team plans to invent a new, low-energy process for phosphite manufacturing that pulls phosphite from existing waste streams, resulting in a sustainable, closed-loop system that supports crop yields as well as riparian ecosystems.

Aquaculture is the fastest growing mode of food production in the world, growing at a rate of approximately 10% per year. Since 2012, fish farms have surpassed wild catch as the main sources of seafood for global populations. While the rapid expansion of aquaculture can serve to alleviate the pressure on natural fisheries, it comes at a high environmental cost, including the destruction of environmentally-beneficial mangroves and the eutrophication of rivers and costal environments. Otto Cordero, Doherty Professor in Ocean Utilization in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will collaborate with scientists and shrimp producers in Ecuador to develop improved probiotics that can help shrimp populations more effectively resist pathogens, reducing waste and decreasing the need for the overuse of antibiotics that negatively affect local ecosystems. He and his team will apply genomics and machine learning techniques in order to engineer a microbiome that supports increased resilience and sustainability in shrimp farming.

Considering Food Supply Chain Resilience in a Changing World

How will agricultural systems meet growing demand for crops from expanding world populations with increasing financial resources? How will the pressures of climate change on agricultural systems affect prices and supply chains? These and other questions affecting global food systems policy have a unifying theme: they all ask how a demand-side shock will affect production. Answers to these questions require an understanding of the “supply function” of an economy—i.e. how producers will respond to the price changes set in motion by changes in demand. For this seed grant project, Dave Donaldson, a professor in the Department of Economics, will lead an effort focused on the US agriculture system. Applying knowledge from satellite data, statistics, and advanced models, he will analyze key demand-side policies in agriculture supply chains, such as price support policies, tariff policies and proposals, and proposals in the ongoing discussion of a US-China trade agreement involving agriculture.

Our current global system of industrial agriculture and food distribution uses farms and other processing and production locations that are typically far from where the food is consumed. This, as well as the need to maintain food freshness in storage, have led to the development of the near ubiquitous use of plastic packaging. While this packaging has helped to greatly expand the availability of nutritious food, at the same time it is creating a major sustainability crisis. Bradley Olsen, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, will lead an effort to develop a novel material that is both fully compostable and carries all of the food safety and preservation properties of plastics themselves. The strategy? Develop new varieties of sustainable polymers that can be produced from biomass and also degraded at the end of use, thus creating a closed carbon cycle.

Improving Water and Food Safety

Cancer is a genetic disease. Most cancers are triggered by mutations caused by carcinogens (e.g., sunlight and chemicals from the environment) that damage our DNA. Research studies are showing how food and beverages—including drinking water—carry higher levels of carcinogens that previously thought, with longstanding negative health effects. The presence of carcinogens in water and food is often caused by environmental contamination caused by manufacturing or other industrial processes. While there are many efforts to reduce the production of these chemicals or remove them from the environment, this J-WAFS-funded seed grant project will take a new approach. Led by John Essigmann, William R. (1956) and Betsy P. Leitch Professor in Residence of Chemistry in the MIT Department of Chemistry and Professor of Toxicology and Biological Engineering in the MIT Department of Biological Engineering, it will leverage molecular biology strategies such as gene editing to help improve people’s natural resistance to these toxins.

Foodborne pathogens, such as Salmonella and E. coli, are a prevalent cause of human disease worldwide, imposing a severe economic burden and constituting a considerable health risk to young, elderly, or immunocompromised individuals. Livestock—particularly cattle—can contribute to the spread of these pathogens, which live in their guts. For this seed grant project, Elizabeth Nolan, professor of chemistry, seeks to target this gut bacteria as a way to limit the spread of foodborne illness. Her strategy is to develop a novel antibacterial agent by engineering existing natural products—microcin M (MccM) and micocin H47 (MccH47)—that can target specific pathogens and control their growth in bovine guts.

With the addition of these eight newly funded projects, J-WAFS will have supported 45 total research projects since the launch of our program in 2014. This funding catalyzes new solutions-oriented research at MIT and supports MIT researchers who bring a wide variety of disciplinary tools and knowledge from working in other sectors to apply their expertise to water and food systems challenges. The results of this investment are already evident: to date, J-WAFS’ seed grant PIs have brought in nearly $13M in follow-on funding, have published numerous papers in internationally recognized journals and publications, obtained patents, and launched spinout companies. Each project yields fresh insights and engages J-WAFS with new partners and thought leaders who drive the development of solutions at and beyond MIT.

J-WAFS Seed Grants, 2020

Enhancing Water Affordability for Vulnerable Urban Households in the United States
PIs: Gabriella Y. Carolini, Associate Professor of International Development and Urban Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning; Lawrence Susskind, Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Data-driven development of probiotics for shrimp aquaculture in Ecuador
PI: Otto X. Cordero, Doherty Professor in Ocean Utilization, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Developing Flexible Estimates of Agricultural Supply Functions for Answering Demand-Side Agricultural Questions
PI: Dave Donaldson, Professor, Department of Economics

Reduction of risk from water- and food-borne N-nitrosamines by induction of the Nrf2 chemo-protective pathway in mammals
PI: John M. Essigmann, William R. (1956) & Betsy P. Leitch Professor in Residence, Professor of Chemistry, Toxicology, and Biological Engineering, Department of Biological Engineering, and Director, Center for Environmental Health Science; Robert Croy, Research Scientist, Center for Environmental Health Science and Department of Biological Engineering

Solving the Phosphite Bottleneck for Next Generation Agriculture and Clean Water
PI: Christopher C. Cummins, Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry

Using siderophore-conjugated microcins to combat foodborne pathogens
PI: Elizabeth Marie Nolan, Professor, Department of Chemistry

Securing the Food Supply with Sustainable Packaging
PI: Bradley Olsen, Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering

Smart porous hydrogels for atmospheric water harvesting
PIs: Xuanhe Zhao, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Gang Chen, Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering