News J-WAFS awards 11th round of seed grants to cohort of ten MIT faculty

This year’s projects address a range of water and food sector needs, such as harvesting water from air, preventing food waste and spoilage, and developing methods to detect forever chemicals in water.

Carolyn Blais Pinter June 11, 2025

As J-WAFS celebrates its ten-year anniversary this spring, we add an impressive eleventh round of seed grant funding to our portfolio. This year’s cohort includes nine different projects that will be led by ten principal investigators from five departments, spanning three schools at MIT—School of Engineering, School of Science, and Sloan School of Management. 

As MIT’s only program dedicated to advancing water and food research, J-WAFS has awarded $25 million in funding to the MIT community over the past ten years. Seed grants are one of J-WAFS’ various grant opportunities, offering up to $150,000 over a two-year period for early-stage research that holds promise for advancing sustainable water and food supplies for human need.

The 2025 projects address a range of water and food sector needs, such as harvesting water from air, preventing food waste and spoilage, developing methods to detect forever chemicals in water, and creating faster ways to diagnose bacteria contaminating food and water sources, among other things.

Read more about each of the awarded projects and the faculty members leading them below.

Optimal Subsidy Design: Application to Food Assistance Programs

Food insecurity remains a major global challenge, especially in low- and middle-income countries where underserved communities often lack access to healthy, affordable food. Governments and organizations provide food-based safety net programs, such as subsidies for essential goods or cash transfers. However, these programs do not always accommodate recipients’ actual needs or preferences, which can reduce their effectiveness and uptake.

Ali Aouad, an assistant professor in the Sloan School of Management, aims to enhance food subsidies by developing an approach to better align food assistance programs with the population's preferences and with policy objectives. Aouad is working with outside collaborators, including: Zhicong Hu of INSEAD, Professor Kamalini Ramdas of the London Business School, and Alp Sungu, PhD, of the Wharton School. The researchers will base their work on experimental evidence from Mumbai, India. Ultimately, they plan to test their 'precision food subsidy' methodology in a pilot field experiment to evaluate new subsidy designs.

Toward sustainable food protein manufacturing

Manufacturing food proteins and cultivated meats by precision cellular agriculture holds promise as an environmentally sustainable replacement for livestock farming by reducing greenhouse gas production and land use impacts of animal agriculture. This approach can also help provide essential food proteins for farm-inaccessible regions. A significant challenge to this goal, however, is the high cost of the growth factor needed to manufacture food proteins. 

Peter Dedon, the Underwood-Prescott Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, aims to reduce manufacturing costs by increasing protein yields in bioreactors using a new alternative genetic code to enhance protein translation. In the standard genetic code, 61 three-nucleotide sequences—called codons—specify 20 amino acids during protein synthesis. Dedon’s team discovered that the “spare” or synonymous codons for each amino acid are concentrated in genes that respond to stresses, such as producing large amounts of a protein, which requires a large amount of energy. Using a machine learning model, Dedon will create a predictive biogeographical map of codon usage patterns across the 5000 genes in a commonly used protein manufacturing organism, Komagataella phaffii. The map will be piloted to reengineer the gene for the FGF2 growth factor for cultured meat production, with the long-term goal of optimizing food protein yields and reducing protein manufacturing costs.

Fluorine-free materials to trap and destroy PFAS

Per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), commonly known as forever chemicals, are widely used in consumer products—such as non-stick cookware, water-resistant clothing, and grease-resistant food packaging—and various other contexts. Yet some specific PFAS molecules are known to be toxic, making their accumulation in drinking water and elsewhere in the environment, a global concern.

To remove and destroy PFAS from contaminated water, Professor Jeremiah Johnson of the Department of Chemistry, proposes a novel class of materials. These materials uniquely combine different chemical interactions to concentrate PFAS synergistically, yielding purified water. Alongside the PFAS absorbing properties, a catalyst will be integrated into the team’s absorbents to allow the destruction of the bound PFAS into benign products. With this novel class of materials capable of removing and destroying PFAS, the researchers hope to pave the way for a PFAS-free future.

Food-safe, wireless RFID sensor on smart packaging for pH monitoring in the cold chain

Mechanical engineering professor Sanjay Sarma is attempting to prevent food waste and spoilage along supply chains, which accounts for millions of tons of food waste each year. Existing methods to assess freshness and product quality rely on chemical changes or microbial growth. These approaches can be expensive and slow, and sometimes require opening the packaging, thereby risking contamination or waste of still-fresh items. Sarma’s lab plans to create low-cost, food-safe sensors that can detect changes in food freshness without opening the package. By incorporating radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, the sensors can communicate that information over short distances. 

The sensors will work by monitoring pH levels, an indicator of spoilage, as many foods release substances that change the pH as they go bad. Instead of using complex electronics or harmful materials, the sensors will be made from natural, food-safe polymers and designed to be part of RFID labels already used on food packages. The goal is to reduce unnecessary food waste by giving clear, early signs of spoilage.

Stable, low cost engineered proteins as biofungicides

Fungal diseases impact many forms of life. Unlike bacteria and viruses, which dominate as human disease pathogens, fungi have historically received little attention. Unfortunately, these understudied microbes are the major agents of disease in food crops. Fungal attacks on staple crops—such as rice, corn, and wheat—threaten global food security, which is already under increasing pressure from a growing population. Current fungal management strategies in agriculture rely heavily on the use of chemical fungicides, which contribute substantially to the cost of producing crops. In addition, they can be highly toxic to a broad range of organisms, including humans. 

Hadley Sikes, a professor of chemical engineering, aims to engineer a novel and safe class of biological fungicides as an affordable and eco-friendly alternative to combat fungal plant pathogens. Her team will first identify pathogen-specific proteins that play a crucial role in fungal development and pathogenicity to plants. The goal is to develop and validate a protein-based biofungicide that protects food crops from fungal infections using engineered binding proteins.

Toward Nitrogen-Fixing Crops: Improving Nitrogenase Activity in Non-Diazotrophic Hosts

Nitrogen is an essential element for life, and although it is readily abundant—dinitrogen (N2) comprises nearly 80% of Earth’s atmosphere—eukaryotes are incapable of incorporating N2 into biomass because of the chemical inertness of the nitrogen triple bond (N≡N). Only microbes that express nitrogenases—enzymes that convert N2 to bioavailable ammonia (NH3)—can assimilate nitrogen from air. Although this process provides substantial quantities of fixed nitrogen for the biosphere, it is not sufficient to produce crops on a scale that sustains our growing human population. As a result, farmers in many parts of the world use nitrogen fertilizers derived from a highly energy-intensive and greenhouse gas-emitting method called the Haber–Bosch process. 

As an alternative to nitrogen fertilizers, Associate Professor of Chemistry Daniel Suess will endeavor to engineer nitrogen-fixing crops that express nitrogenase. He will study the chemical processes by which nitrogenase is assembled, potentially leading to improved nitrogenase activity in non-native organisms, and ultimately to the development of crops that can supply their own nitrogen.

Benchtop NMR with Dynamic Nuclear Polarization for Ultra-Sensitive PFAS Detection

Per- and poly-fluoroalkane substances (PFAS) are not biodegradable and do not burn, which has led to an accumulation of PFAS in the environment and in our bodies. Exposure to PFAS has been associated with adverse health effects, including altered immune function, liver disease, kidney disease, and cancer. Due to their harmful effects, the EPA has issued new impending regulations on the acceptable concentrations of PFAS in drinking water. But current detection methods require expensive equipment, highly skilled operators, and they struggle in determining highly complex mixtures containing PFAS species beyond the six PFAS targeted for regulation.

Fluorine-19 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is a spectroscopic method that provides a more accurate, easy-to-use alternative. Tim Swager and Robert Guy Griffin, professors in the Department of Chemistry, will work together to develop NMR methods that meet the EPA parts per trillion PFAS detection limits. The researchers will use dynamic nuclear polarization, wherein the magnetically abundant Fluorine-19 nuclei are aligned with an applied magnetic field.

AI enabled spectral fingerprinting of pathogens for rapid food and water screening

Despite public health measures, food and waterborne illnesses still cause over 420,000 deaths and $110 billion in losses worldwide each year. Current testing methods for detecting pathogens are slow, costly, and labor-intensive. Can we diagnose bacteria contaminating food and water sources in minutes rather than days? This is the research question that Loza Tadesse, an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering, seeks to answer.

Tadesse’s team is using signal-enhancing microbeads and Raman spectroscopy—a biosensing technique that measures a sample’s unique molecular “fingerprint” through inelastic light scattering. These pathogen-specific beads capture microbes like Salmonella, E. coli, and cholera-causing bacteria directly from liquid samples and amplify their Raman signals for detection. The resulting Raman spectra are analyzed by on-device machine learning algorithms to accurately identify the pathogens and assess their resistance to antibiotics—information critical for deciding treatment and containment strategies.  

Global Access to Safe Drinking Water in Resource-Constrained and Water Scarce Areas

Currently, 2.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and this number is projected to surge to 5 billion globally by 2050 due to the combined effects of climate change, population growth, and increasing urban, industrial, and domestic water demand. Mechanical engineering Professor Xuanhe Zhao and his team aim to provide global access to safe drinking water at scale and speed by scaling up and deploying efficient, low-cost, low-maintenance, decentralized water harvesting systems.

Recognizing the complexities of landlocked, off-grid regions with limited energy infrastructure and maintenance access, the team’s project focuses on a solar-driven atmospheric water harvesting (SAWH) system, a fully passive system that utilizes only solar energy to extract water from ambient air. The technology is designed for family-scale implementation, targeting regions with constrained resources.