John H. Lienhard
Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering
Director of J-WAFS

I founded J-WAFS in the spring of 2014, with the generous support of Mohammed Jameel, as a research organization that would engage faculty across departments for diverse and impactful work on water and food systems. Renee Robins and I have worked closely to refine this vision and to identify the best ways to collaborate with the MIT community. J-WAFS is now firmly established as an endowment-driven research funder within the Institute. Our support has mobilized faculty and students to take on the complex, multidisciplinary problems inherent to humanity’s need for water and food. More than 10% of MIT’s faculty have been funded by J-WAFS.

This semester, J-WAFS will publish a series of articles reflecting on our work over the past decade. These stories, by our staff and collaborators, will feature research projects we have funded and the efforts of faculty, students, and other researchers at MIT. To begin, I offer this introduction to how J-WAFS operates and the aims we pursue.

What J-WAFS does

J-WAFS supports research by MIT faculty and students on the critical need for safe, sufficient, and sustainable supplies of water and food, particularly in the face of growing population, increasing urbanization, and climate change. This research is not conducted by J-WAFS’ staff. Instead, we fund MIT faculty and students to pursue work in their own labs across the Institute. This approach leverages the diverse expertise, methodologies, and laboratories of MIT. Our core funding mechanism is a seed grant.

J-WAFS awards seed grants through peer review, initiated by an annual call for proposals. Reviews are conducted by MIT faculty chosen for their expertise. We sometimes seek reviews from external experts. All proposals originate within MIT—meaning that the overall quality is high. We can fund only about 20% of what comes in, and so we must say no to many colleagues. Given this intense competition, principal investigators often have some proposals declined while others succeed in later years, and vice versa.

J-WAFS actively monitors the projects we fund. Our seed grants, which typically span two years, are designed to support a graduate student’s work. We require regular reporting, monitor spending, and limit expenditures to those directly supporting a project’s goals. J-WAFS’ financial staff works closely with PIs to keep spending on track. Additionally, our communications team uses the reports we receive to publicize the research. This publicity has sometimes led directly to further collaborations or funding.

Peer-review and a well-defined mission are crucial in preventing programmatic sprawl. We focus on the human need for water and food, and we review proposals not only for technical excellence, but also the likelihood of relevant outcomes that can have real-world impact.

Portfolio model

Our funding model implies a portfolio approach, addressing water and food from many different angles and in a wide variety of contexts. We have not centered our program around any single topic—that narrower focus is better suited to smaller groups of faculty. The portfolio model enables J-WAFS to respond to emerging research trends as they arise. For instance, when J-WAFS was founded, MIT researchers were not paying much attention to PFAS or aquaculture, nor applying machine learning to water and food systems. Today, we are receiving many proposals on these topics.

J-WAFS projects are only a starting point for many ideas. Achieving large-scale impact typically requires sustained, long-term funding. J-WAFS has the resources to support seed grants across MIT, and we have awarded a handful of “Grand Challenge” grants for more ambitious projects, at ten times the funding. But follow-on support from other sources is essential to fully develop most concepts. Notably, J-WAFS-funded PIs have secured tens of millions of external dollars to advance the ideas they initiated with our grants.

Where can MIT have an impact?

Even a portfolio model should prioritize novel projects that are likely to have significant outcomes. But how can MIT make a meaningful contribution when water and food systems are so diverse, so context-dependent, and so vast in scale? We have neither a school of agriculture nor a traditional program in water infrastructure. In such situations, as my late colleague Professor Ronald F. Probstein once said, we should focus on areas where MIT has an “unfair advantage” over other institutions.

Many innovative proposals have come from faculty whose unique disciplinary strengths align with a problem in water or food. Very often, breakthroughs happen when novel science or cutting-edge technology is applied to a longstanding question—or to an emergent question. For example, one PI saw that his invention for detecting explosives could also be used to sense pollutants in water. In this light, the broad interests of our research community are an advantage. Additionally, MIT’s uniquely entrepreneurial culture rapidly moves research to market-ready solutions.

Where does MIT excel? We’ve seen exciting work in plant biochemistry and genomics, reflecting MIT’s growing interest in plant biology. An ongoing project aims to enhance the efficiency of the RuBisCO enzyme, which catalyzes CO₂ fixation during photosynthesis. The rising use of machine learning in water and food systems taps MIT’s considerable strength in computing. MIT’s recent discovery of the evaporative photomolecular effect is being leveraged for solar desalination. J-WAFS’ partnership with Xylem, Inc. led MIT machine designers to invent a novel variable volute pump that maintains high efficiency under shifting loads. Chemical and membrane separation processes to remove toxins from water have been another strong theme. MIT researchers are also addressing economic and social issues, such as new forms of crop reinsurance and the prevention of water shut offs in low-income communities. A cross-school team reduced supply chain risks for small irrigation-equipment vendors in drought-prone regions of Senegal.

J-WAFS-funded projects have spun out more than 10 companies. These innovators have commercialized graphene water-treatment membranes, optical sensors for food pathogens, portable water purification systems, affordable E. coli tests for developing countries, surfactants to control pesticides, hydrogels to remove organic pollutants, and low-cost crop storage systems for tropical climates.

These examples are just a few of the well over 100 J-WAFS-funded projects to date.

Large-scale challenges

Clean water and safe food are humankind’s most essential needs, yet we struggle to ensure their availability to all. Megacities in the developing world often lack functioning water and wastewater systems, and many will not soon obtain the capital to fully build out traditional piped infrastructure. How can we deliver safe water to the millions who need it? Crop productivity in the developing world lags far behind industrialized farming in the developed world. Even a modest increase in fertilizer use could double yields. How can we get affordable fertilizers to smallholders in regions like sub-Saharan Africa and India? Almost 40% of Earth’s land is used for food production—how can we intensify agriculture to limit further growth of this footprint, or even reduce it? How can we mitigate the environmental costs of fertilizers, of large-scale monoculture farming, and of overfishing? How can we address the worldwide depletion of aquifers? And how can we better detect and remove toxins and pathogens from water, especially to protect the young children who are most vulnerable?

Among large-scale challenges, the rapid advance of climate change is truly terrifying. Since I founded J-WAFS, the planet has warmed by more than 0.4°C. Experts at our 2018 workshop on climate and agriculture described how global warming and rising weather variability impair crop growth. These effects are now apparent even to casual observers. Fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change, but the food system itself generates one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. We urgently need adaptation strategies, such as drought-tolerant crop varieties, and mitigation strategies, such as policies to drive sustainable agriculture practices.

Further, cross-sector collaboration is essential if research is to motivate effective policies. J-WAFS created the multi-institutional Food and Climate Systems Transformation Alliance (FACT Alliance) to support such dialog.

Supporting graduate student researchers

Graduate students are the engine of research, but their disciplinary coursework often lacks the broader context of water and food systems. J-WAFS seeks to fill this gap by exposing students broadly to these fields and associated career opportunities. We support the MIT Water Club and the MIT Food and Agriculture Club, which organize a joint business plan competition and other multidisciplinary events. We award conference travel grants, so that graduate students can meet global leaders in these fields, for example, by attending Stockholm Water Week. We help students commercialize their ideas through the J-WAFS Solutions program. And our research workshops bring together project teams from across MIT. Those lively discussions expose students to diverse perspectives on water and food systems.

We also award fellowships to graduate students doing outstanding research in water or food. Some of our fellowship support has come from additional donors, such as the Meswani family, or from our industrial partners.

What to look for this spring

Forthcoming articles in this 10th anniversary series will go more deeply into J-WAFS’ impact, with detailed discussions of research projects, profiles of faculty and students, and examples of our support for commercialization. And, on the afternoon of May 22nd, J-WAFS will host a 10th anniversary reception, open to the entire community. I very much hope to see you there!

23 January 2025