Testing the waters — collaboratively
As a water research center co-founded by Marquette receives a new round of federal support, its model of industry-university collaboration yields a Marquette researcher’s lead sensor that five companies have agreed to license.
By Tracy Staedter
Like many academic researchers, Dr. Chung Hoon Lee, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, understands that exciting new technologies emerging from university labs may not always attract much interest from businesses. Lee, who joined Marquette’s faculty in 2008 and holds six patents for sensing technology, found over the years that his innovative solutions didn’t always match market demand. “Sometimes with academia and industry, the linkage is not very strong,” he says.
Seeing an opportunity to bolster that connection, Lee began working with the Water, Equipment and Policy Center in 2009, the year it was founded. The group, an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC), is part of a National Science Foundation program that brings researchers from participating universities together with corporations from a given industry in need of solutions. At the WEP Center, researchers from Marquette and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee respond to global water challenges identified by industry members with proposals for technological solutions.
Members — large and small companies, as well as institutes and public utilities — help fund the research through annual fees that range from $25,000 to $100,000 per year. Offering members incredible value compared to bringing these research and development efforts in-house, the center has seen robust support from the water sector, says Dr. Daniel Zitomer, chair and professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering and the Marquette University site director of the WEP Center. Recently approved for its third and final phase of NSF funding, the center is poised to operate independently starting in 2027.
For Lee and other researchers, involvement has been a boon. With feedback from partners, Lee developed a unique waterborne lead sensor that continuously monitors water for heavy metal contaminants without ever coming into contact with it, thereby limiting corrosion and the sensor failures that result from it. The technology was so appealing to the water industry that it sparked a licensing agreement that Marquette’s Office of Economic Engagement negotiated with five WEP-member companies: A.O. Smith, Badger Meter, Pentair, Watts Water Technologies and GE Appliances, a Haier Co.
“Having five companies interested in licensing a new technology is very rare. … It shows that this is a relevant technology with broad applicability,” says Zitomer.
Getting five companies to sign identical agreements is even more rare, but they did so in this case. “It was the first time in WEP’s 10-year history that five industry members agreed to the exact same deal for a single technology,” says Dr. Kalpa Vithalani, executive director of technology transfer in the Office of Economic Engagement. The office helps forge licensing agreements that allow Marquette and its faculty researchers to retain intellectual property rights and continue advancing scientific inquiry while transferring patent rights to corporations for exclusive rights to market the technology.
“The process was seamless and went smoothly,” says Dan Fellers, manager of research and development at Badger Meter. “Marquette’s Office of Economic Engagement was able to aggregate the legal needs of five different organizations and pull together language that satisfied everyone, which is a substantial feat.”
Water, water everywhere
The origin of the WEP Center dates to the early 2000s, when Milwaukee’s water industry was fizzing with excitement. An independent survey conducted at the behest of business and civic leaders had found that 120 water-related companies existed in the city, some that had emerged a century earlier to support breweries and tanneries. They’d never formerly connected with one another, so in 2007, the city’s first Water Summit convened. Later it led to the formation of the nonprofit The Water Council. In the meantime, the United Nations validated Milwaukee as a hub for water tech and expertise when, in 2009, it added it to the Global Compact Cities Program for managing freshwater resources. And UW-Milwaukee announced it was building the nation’s first School of Freshwater Sciences.
Amid this energy, none other than Dr. Michael R. Lovell — now president of Marquette but then dean of UW-Milwaukee’s College of Engineering and Applied Science — teamed up with Marquette to apply for an NSF grant to create WEP. Lovell had previously helped establish an NSF-funded industry-university research program while he was the associate dean of research at the University of Pittsburgh and saw an opportunity in Milwaukee to do something similar. The grant was awarded in 2009, and the WEP Center officially launched in 2010, the same year a site was selected for Milwaukee’s Global Water Center, a business and research facility that now serves as the headquarters for The Water Council.
“With its access to brilliant minds and abundant fresh water,” Milwaukee seemed uniquely poised to be an international leader in water technology and development, Lovell recalls. “My colleagues and I recognized the potential for UW-Milwaukee, Marquette and our community partners to innovate around water quality and policy in a way that uniquely synthesizes high-level research with the water industry to create new technology and lasting change.”
Detecting lead
Today the WEP Center is one of 80 NSF-sponsored IUCRCs across the country — and ranks as one of the 25 longest active among them. While NSF funding has covered a share of administrative costs and will do so through 2026, industry members pay annual fees to collaborate with one another and researchers at UW-Milwaukee and Marquette. Some of the fruits of their partnerships include technological solutions such as Lee’s sensor, called a block loop-gap resonator, which he built to test for the presence of lead and other heavy metal contaminants in water. Feedback from AO Smith and other industry partners identified specifications for the prototype early on, such as the need for continuous detection; a cost of $1 per sensor; and the ability to easily integrate it into existing water systems.
After some trial-and-error and feedback from the partners, Lee made a device that looks like a small metal box pierced with a quarter-inch diameter glass tube. A water sample goes inside the tube, preventing it from contacting metal components and corroding them. Inside the box, an alternating electrical current emits microwaves that permeate the glass tube and reflect off charged metal particles called ions in the water. Those that bounce off lead ions produce a slightly different microwave signal than those that bounce off other ions. The reflected microwave amplitudes are analyzed using a machine learning algorithm to evaluate the concentration of lead in water.
Lee’s current prototype can be tuned to work well with water from specific municipalities but needs more technological tweaking before it’s universal. Nonetheless, industry partners recognized the potential for incorporating the technology into their products without stepping competitively on one another’s toes.
“We saw this as a promising advancement in low-cost, accurate, real-time heavy-metal sensing,” says, Rebecca Tallon, director of Water Treatment Technologies at AO Smith.
Over the last 10 years, the IUCRC program has sponsored 89 research projects, produced 13 patent applications and signed 23 licensing deals.
Keeping it dry
Research and technology are not the only important things the WEP Center does, says Zitomer. It also fosters workforce development and industry networking and provides scientific data that supports policies for water resource management.
“Not all water research is wet,” he says. Industry members join to network with one another and gain access to a strong workforce. Students at UW-Milwaukee and Marquette develop cutting-edge know-how through research projects and internships. Many of them become permanent employees. Since 2010, this workforce development engine has connected 171 students with research projects and activities and helped 54 students find employment at member companies.
The collaboration also produces scientific data useful to developing policies around water management. For example, WEP funded an interdisciplinary study in 2016 conducted by Professor David Strifling, Eng ’00, Law ’04, director of Marquette Law School’s Water Law and Policy Initiative, to investigate road salt, which contains environmentally unfriendly chlorides. The goal was to examine the underlying causes of unsustainable chloride pollution and then propose a menu of responsive legal and policy options. Strifling published the results in 2018, analyzing the technical and legal contours of various possible responses such as governmental regulation and incentivized self-governance. Since then, Strifling has informally consulted with several Wisconsin communities and the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission about the issue.
The center is now funding a similar study to investigate “forever chemicals,” such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a group of chemicals commonly used in airplane de-icers, fire suppression agents, and coatings and products that resist heat, oil, stains, grease and water. They can seep into groundwater and break down extremely slowly or not at all in the environment. Studies show that these chemicals adversely affect human growth and development and may affect reproduction, thyroid function, the immune system and more.
“The future of the WEP Center is bright, as it works toward solutions to water scarcity and the lack of clean, affordable water needed globally,” says Zitomer. The center anticipates growing larger by adding industry members and researchers to tackle existing and emerging problems. New products that measure, treat and conserve water that have their start in Milwaukee through WEP efforts will be available in the marketplace.
“It’s clear that Milwaukee’s liquid gifts to the world are more than beer,” he says.
For a deeper dive, learn more about the Water Equipment Policy industry-university research center and the technology transfer efforts of Marquette’s Office of Economic Engagement.
