MIT J-WAFS Food and Water News: upcoming events, funding
opportunities, and more.
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J-WAFS Food & Water NewsMay 2016
In this issue….
Recap of J-WAFS' inaugural conference and the MIT Food
and Agribusiness Innovation Prize.
Highlight: MIT Water Club
MIT Water Club Open House, DuPont Summit call for proposal,
and
more.
News Items
J-WAFS conference reflects growing interest in food and
waterresearch on campusThe MIT community turned out in force, along
with attendees from the corporate,government, and non-profit
sectors.
MIT faculty, staff, and students gathered
at the Wong Auditorium on April 27 and
28, accompanied by many
representatives of member companies of
the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP)
and other interested corporate and non-
profit attendees, for the Abdul Latif
Jameel World Water and Food Security’s
first major event. Co-sponsored by ILP
and with a theme of innovation and collaboration, the conference
highlighted the growing need
for creative cross-sector problem-solving to address significant
food and water security issues
around the world. As the challenges in providing safe and
sufficient supplies of food and water
to an ever-growing and increasingly urban world population
multiply, multi-sector partnerships
and collaborations are becoming important ways to address
system-level issues, as well as to
promote the development and adoption of new technologies.
Commenting on J-WAFS’ role at MIT,
director John Lienhard described one of
its programs, J-WAFS Solutions, which
supports the commercialization of MIT
technologies and provides support and
mentorship for MIT faculty and students
around food and water innovation and
entrepreneurship. “We heard over and
over at the conference about the
importance of not just innovating, but building successful
companies, enterprises, and
collaborations that enable those innovations to make a
difference in the world,” he said. “The
success of this conference signals the growing interest the MIT
community has in applying MIT’s
excellent track record in this regard to our food and water
security challenges.”
For highlights from the technology talks, the “Risk and
Resilience” panel, and the startup
exchange and poster session, read the full story here.
MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize
On April 28th, following the J-WAFS/ILP Food &
Water Conference, the first ever MIT Food and
Agribusiness Innovation Prize culminated with
its finalist presentations and award ceremony in
the Samberg Center. This business plan
competition, sponsored by J-WAFS and produced
by the MIT Food & Agriculture Club, asked
university and graduate students to submit their
ideas for innovations in food and agribusiness,
promising the winning teams funding, mentorship,
and access to a broader business community.
GoMango, the team of MIT and Harvard University students that
took home the first place prize,
aims to dramatically improve access in India to affordable cold
storage and transport for
perishable farm produce. The second place prize was won by Safi
Organics, working on a
carbon-negative soil amendment product that helps rural
small-holder farmers to improve their
crop yields by up to 30%, while the third place prize went to
Ricult, a team which has established
a multi-sided mobile e-commerce platform that provides farmers
direct access to financial
instruments, logistics providers, input sellers, end buyers, and
real time crop information.
The MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize was sponsored by
Rabobank, a premier bank
to the food and agribusiness sectors. Rabobank supports
innovative and sustainable thinking
about food and agribusiness products and services, and will
offer mentorship and networking
opportunities to the winning teams.
For the full write-up from the MIT News Office, click here.
Upcoming MIT Events
MIT Water: Open House Lunch
When: May 10th, 12:00pm-1:00pmWhere: MIT. Bldg 3, Room 442,
Cambridge, MA.
On May 10th, the MIT Water Club will host an open house lunch
for those interested in joining
the MIT Water Club. The current leaders will give an overview of
their activities this past year as
well as discuss their plans for the future. Come meet the MIT
Water Club team and learn how
you can get involved!
For more information, click here.
Call For Papers
The 9th Annual Dupont Summit 2016on Science, Technology, and
Environmental Policy
The DuPont Summit will take place on Friday, December 2nd at The
Historic Whittemore House
in Washington DC. The annual call for papers has just opened,
and potential attendees are
asked to send a 1-2 page abstract to PSO Executive Director,
Daniel Gutierrez, at
[email protected]. The early consideration deadline will
be September 15th, 2016.
Proposals submitted by the early deadline will be given
priority.
The goal of the Dupont Summit is to promote multidisciplinary
conversation and networking
across the social and political spectrum about pressing issues
related to science, technology
and the environment. The conference brings together academics,
government, business and
social leaders from a variety of backgrounds, for discussion
about issues that include but that
are not limited to:
Energy
National security
Ethical, legal and social implications of science and technology
policy
Technology and innovation
Water and natural resources
Biotechnology
Environment and climate change
And more
For more information on the DuPont Summit, including application
requirements and
deadlines, click here.
J-WAFS Highlight
MIT Water Innovation Prize culminates active yearfor the MIT
Water Club
On Friday, April 8th, nearly 150 MIT students, faculty, and
members of the water community
gathered in the Kirsch Auditorium for the finals of the MIT
Water Club’s Water Innovation Prize.
Nine finalist teams delivered five-minute pitches, followed by
judges’ questions. The teams, all of
which included MIT students, presented a wide variety of water
innovation strategies addressing
water testing, treatment, and usage. Following the pitches, the
judges retreated to review their
scoring and results. The audience then listened as Christine
Boyle, the founder of Valor Water
Analytics, delivered a keynote address alongside the previous
year’s winners, AquaFresco and
WellDone, while waiting in anticipation for the judges’
decision.
The judges for the event included John
Lienhard, director of the MIT Abdul Latif
Jameel World Water and Food Security
Lab (J-WAFS), and Karen Golmer, a
long-time mentor for startup
companies and judge for competitions, as
well as the managing director with Water-
Strategies, LLC. They were joined by
Cynthia Fisher, the founder and
managing director of WaterRev, LLC; Grace Feng, head of the
Hydration Beverage Platform at
PepsiCo R&D; and Philip Ashcroft, former board director of
Veolia Water North America and
executive vice president of its municipal outsourcing
business.
By the end of the night, $20,000 in funding was divided among
three winning teams with two
additional awards totaling $10,000 given under the new Veraqua
Prize for support
of demonstrable technologies that focus on water challenges
facing China. Winning teams not
only received funding that could potentially bring their
water-related solutions to market, but also
critical mentorship from industry experts, including Michael
Murphy of MassCEC, Scott Landers
of Opti, Laurent Savaete of City Taps, among several others.
The three winning teams, each taking
home $6,666 in funding, were Redox
Water Solutions, AquaPower, and
Groundstate. Redox Water Solutions also
won the Veraqua Prize (an award of
$7,000), while MyH2O took second
($3,000). Among the winners, both
GroundState and AquaPower focused on
improving water efficiency to increase
production yields. GroundState seeks to minimize water wasted in
agriculture and maximize
yields by enabling intelligent irrigation through the use of
low-cost, RFID-based soil moisture
sensors distributed throughout a field, while AquaPower aims to
help fish farmers in the
developing world increase yields and earnings from their
operations by over 25% through a low-
cost system that improves water quality. With two separate
awards, the big winner of the night
was Redox Water Solutions. The team is seeking to commercialize
advanced electrochemical
processes for energy-efficient wastewater treatment, and targets
micropollutants of concern in
both the US and emerging markets.
This second-annual MIT Water Innovation Prize comes on the heels
of an extremely successful
year for the four-year-old MIT Water Club. It has been a year
that has seen attention to water
and food security issues heightened across departments at MIT
and in the New England area,
consolidating a dynamic, interdisciplinary community committed
to solving these issues. Led by
co-presidents Matthew Willner, a graduate student in the
Department of Urban Studies and
Planning, and Alexis Fischer, doctoral student in biological
oceanography in the MIT-Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program, the Water Club
hosts numerous events
throughout the year that engage students and others in the MIT
community in order to explore
and support ways by which cutting-edge research, innovation, and
policy can help solve the
most pressing challenges in the water sector.
Co-president Alexis Fischer credits the
club’s many successful initiatives this
year to the growth of the club’s
leadership team, a dynamic group of
urban planners, research scientists, and
business personnel, which has been
proactive in engaging a host of local
companies and partners. Because of the
involvement of companies and
organizations like MassCEC, Desalitech, and Gradiant, vital
linkages between the MIT water
community and those working the field have allowed for the Water
Club to build upon the work
they have done in previous years, inspiring innovative solutions
to pressing global water
challenges. Likewise, the provision of funding from
organizations like PepsiCo and Veraqua, the
primary sponsors of the Water Innovation Prize, has been
instrumental in helping to bring these
solutions to market.
In addition to the Water Innovation Prize, the club also
sponsored two other flagship events this
year that garnered widespread attention, the Water Summit and
Water Night.
In November, the MIT Water Summit
brought together leaders from industry,
government, and the scientific community
to discuss the greatest challenges and
opportunities in the water sector. This
two-day event, for which J-WAFS was
the primary sponsor, centered on the
issue of climate change and was kicked
off by J-WAFS director John Lienhard. In
his address, he challenged attendees to
consider the role of research and
innovation in addressing the unprecedented threat posed by
population growth, urbanization,
and climate change, before introducing an extensive list of
speakers doing exactly that.
In March, the MIT Water Club brought some of this promising
research and innovation to the
forefront in their fourth annual MIT Water Night, which
showcased the work of MIT and other
local individuals and research groups in water-related fields.
With more attendees than ever
before, and research that represented the efforts of
undergraduates, experts, and research
personnel alike, there was a palpable sense of growing interest
in understanding and tackling
water security issues.
Fischer asserts that this is evidence of a larger awareness of
water issues as a whole, pointing
to the presence of a rising number of water-related companies
and organizations in New
England. She explains that this is in part due to the attention
being directed towards climate
change as well as the fact that water security issues have begun
to present themselves within
the US, notably the significant amount of press around water
scarcity in California and the Flint
water quality crisis.
Nonetheless, there is a lot more work to be done.
As described by Seth Siegel, author of Let There
Be Water and one of the many experts the MIT
Water Club brought to campus as part of its
lecture series this year, we must move towards a
“water reverence culture” and set systems in
place that are conducive to changing water
structures. In other words, we must force
ourselves to fundamentally re-think the role water
plays in our society and how we manage it going
into the future. While this is a challenging task and
there is obviously a long road ahead, the MIT
Water Club couldn’t be more excited to travel it.
And, working at the nexus of a dynamic
community of MIT departments and other
Boston-area universities and water organizations, they may be in
the best position to do so.
Commenting on the success of the recent Water Innovation Prize,
Alexis Fischer explains, “Just
like the growth of the MIT Water Club in general, it’s an
iterative process year-to-year to build
successful events and value in the community.”
On May 10th, the MIT Water Club will host an Open House Lunch to
present their plans for the
future and to meet with those interested in joining the
leadership team for the coming year.
If you’re interested in learning more about the MIT Water Club,
visit their website here.
Copyright © 2016 MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food
Security Lab, All rights reserved.
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