Innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues are being discovered daily in MIT’s labs, classrooms, and centers. These breakthroughs often transition from the lab to the commercial sector with the support of over 85 resources within MIT’s extensive innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) leverages MIT’s I&E expertise to help researchers commercialize their technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS equips MIT researchers for the commercial world, aiming to enhance the productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, thereby generating economic, environmental, and societal benefits.
Launched in 2015 with support from Community Jameel, an international organization that promotes science and learning, the J-WAFS Solutions program has supported 19 projects with one-year grants of up to $150,000, with some receiving renewal grants for a second year. These projects address challenges related to water or food and are modeled after MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation’s grant program. The J-WAFS Solutions program supports projects that have completed basic research and proof-of-concept phases, with technologies one to three years from commercialization. Grantees work on identifying potential markets and focusing on how their technology can meet future customer needs.
“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving inventions that can be translated into real-world applications for widespread adoption,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “But successful commercialization requires engineers to address challenges beyond making the technology work. MIT’s I&E network offers programs that help researchers develop technology readiness, investigate markets, conduct customer discovery, and initiate product design and development,” Lienhard adds. “With this strong I&E framework, many J-WAFS Solutions teams have established startup companies by the end of the grant. J-WAFS-supported technologies have had powerful, positive effects on human welfare. Together, the J-WAFS Solutions program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem demonstrate how academic research can evolve into business innovations that make a better world,” Lienhard says.
Creating I&E collaborations
J-WAFS Solutions grants not only support further research but also teach faculty, students, postdocs, and research staff how to transform their work into commercial products and companies. As part of the grant requirements, researchers must engage with mentors through MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with teams of selected professionals who provide free and confidential mentorship, guidance, and other services to advance ideas into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs across all industries, with nearly 200 mentors volunteering their time. J-WAFS Solutions teams have been guided by 21 mentors from various companies and nonprofits, who often attend project events and progress meetings throughout the grant period.
“Working with VMS has provided me and my organization with a valuable sounding board for a range of topics,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former research engineer in MIT’s D-Lab and founder of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Verploegen received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to help farmers preserve fruits and vegetables in rural off-grid communities. He started CoolVeg in 2022 to increase access and adoption of evaporative cooling technologies through collaborations with businesses, research institutions, NGOs, and government agencies. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit venture, it is always great to have avenues to get feedback on communications approaches, overall strategy, and operational issues that my mentors have experience with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the initial Solutions grant, one of the VMS mentors still mentors Verploegen today.
Another requirement for Solutions grant teams is participation in the Spark program — a free, three-week course that provides an entry point for researchers to explore the potential value of their innovation. Spark is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), an “immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” In 2018, MIT received an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to deliver I-Corps training across New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who want to engage in a customer discovery process for their technology. Offered regularly throughout the year, the Spark course helps participants identify markets and explore customer needs to understand how their technologies can be positioned competitively. They learn to assess barriers to adoption, potential regulatory issues, and other commercialization challenges. NE-I-Corps reports that over 1,200 researchers from MIT have completed the program, launching 175 ventures, raising over $3.3 billion in funding, and creating over 1,800 jobs.
Constantinos Katsimpouras, a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering, went through the NE I-Corps Spark program to better understand the customer base for a technology he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 for their microbial platform that converts food waste from the dairy industry into valuable products. “As a scientist with no prior experience in entrepreneurship, the program introduced me to important concepts and tools for conducting customer interviews and adopting a new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most importantly, it encouraged me to engage in interviews with potential customers and stakeholders, providing invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my industry,” he adds. These interviews also helped connect the team with companies willing to provide resources to test and improve their technology — a critical step to scaling up any lab invention.
Professor Cem Tasan’s research group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering found the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Solutions grant. Tasan is working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Solutions project to manufacture formable sheet metal by consolidating steel scrap without melting, reducing water use compared to traditional steel processing. Before applying for the Solutions grant, Guvenc participated in NE I-Corps. “This program required me to engage with potential customers, allowing me to learn about their challenges and test my initial market assumptions,” Guvenc recalls. “My interviews with industry professionals made me aware of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, leading to the J-WAFS 2023 Solutions Grant,” says Guvenc.
After completing the Spark program, participants may apply for the Fusion program, which provides microgrants of up to $1,500 for further customer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring teams to conduct 12 additional customer interviews and craft a final presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Solutions team completed the Spark and Fusion programs at MIT. Recently, their team was accepted into the NSF I-Corps National program with a $50,000 award, requiring an additional 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Located in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is developing a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to rapidly remove micropollutants from water. The team’s focus has expanded to higher-value purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 worked with Doyle on much of the underlying science.
“Our platform technology could potentially be used for selective separations in diverse market segments,” Gokhale explains. “The I-Corps Spark program added significant value by providing an effective framework to approach this problem. I was assigned a mentor who provided critical feedback, teaching me how to formulate effective questions and identify promising opportunities.” Gokhale says that by the end of Spark, the team identified the best target markets for their products. He also found the seminars on topics like intellectual property valuable for subsequent discussions with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.
Another member of Doyle’s team, Arjav Shah, a recent PhD from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a current MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is leading the team’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion last fall and hopes to lead efforts to incorporate a startup company called hydroGel. “I admire the hypothesis-driven approach of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to identify our customers’ biggest pain points, which will hopefully lead us to finding a product-market fit.” He adds, “based on our learnings from the program, we have pivoted to impact-driven, higher-value applications in the food processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical team at hydroGel alongside Shah.
In a different project, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Solutions project, which aims to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of major algal species and provide early detection of harmful algal blooms. After completing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to participate in the Fusion program, and potentially the National I-Corps program, to further explore market opportunities and minimize risks in our future product development.”
Economic and societal benefits
Commercializing technologies developed at MIT is one way J-WAFS ensures that MIT research advances have real-world impacts on water and food systems. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions program has awarded 28 grants (including renewals), supporting 19 projects addressing a range of global water and food challenges. The program has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 research staff, 15 postdocs, and 30 students across MIT. Nearly half of all J-WAFS Solutions projects have resulted in spinout companies or commercialized products, including eight companies and two open-source technologies.
Nona Technologies is an example of a J-WAFS spinout that is developing new approaches to produce freshwater for drinking. Desalination typically requires large-scale technology called reverse osmosis, but Nona created a desalination device that works in remote off-grid locations. By separating salt and bacteria from water using electric current through ion concentration polarization (ICP), their technology reduces overall energy consumption. The method was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and research scientist Junghyo Yoon. Along with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Technologies to bring their lightweight, energy-efficient desalination technology to the market.
“My feeling early on was that once you have technology, commercialization will take care of itself,” admits Crawford. The team completed both the Spark and Fusion programs and quickly realized that much more work was required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we learned that the two first markets we envisioned would not be viable in the near term, and we also got our first hints at the beachhead we ultimately selected,” says Crawford. Nona Technologies has since won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, received media attention from outlets like Newsweek and Fortune, and hired a team that continues to advance the technology for deployment in resource-limited areas where clean drinking water may be scarce.
Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security.
“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually.
J-WAFS Solutions companies have raised nearly $66 million in venture capital and other funding. Just this past June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration announced that it raised an $11.8 million seed round. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was another early J-WAFS Solutions grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The project enabled the development of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout companies, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was part of the original J-WAFS team. Smith is CEO of the company and has overseen the advancement of the membrane technology, which has reduced cost and resource consumption in industrial wastewater treatment, advanced manufacturing, and resource extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries. The company also recently announced that it is working with the mining company Rio Tinto to handle harmful wastewater generated at mines.
But it’s not just J-WAFS spinout companies that are producing real-world results. Products like the ECC Vial — a portable, low-cost method for E. coli detection in water — have been brought to the market and helped thousands of people. The test kit was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT History Section. The duo received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2018 to promote safely managed drinking water and improved public health in Nepal, where it is difficult to identify which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the end of their grant period, the team had manufactured approximately 3,200 units, of which 2,350 were distributed — enough to help 12,000 people in Nepal. The researchers also trained local Nepalese on best manufacturing practices.
“It’s very important, in my life experience, to follow your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Economic success is important to the health of any venture, whether it’s a company or a product, but equally important is the social impact — a philosophy that J-WAFS research strives to uphold. “Do something because it’s worth doing and because it changes people’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott adds.
As J-WAFS prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, we look forward to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E programs to advance knowledge and develop solutions that will have tangible effects on the world’s water and food systems.
Learn more about the J-WAFS Solutions program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT.
