WRF Presents $100K Research Award to Advance Water Quality Treatment
Last week, The Water Research Foundation (WRF) presented Jeffrey McCutcheon, PhD, with the esteemed 2024 Paul L. Busch Award at WEFTEC in New Orleans, LA. With this $100,000 research prize, Dr. McCutcheon plans to create customizable water treatment membranes using additive manufacturing.
Dr. McCutcheon is a General Electric Professor of Advanced Manufacturing at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. He is widely known for pioneering within the field of forward osmosis technology. His significant contributions amount to more than 115 papers with over 13,000 citations, three issued patents, over 100 lectures and seminars given around the world, and a number of awards and honors for his scientific achievements.
With his goal of diversifying water treatment solutions, Dr. McCutcheon will focus on reverse osmosis, nanofiltration, and ion exchange. Commercial membranes in these technology areas are generally limited to a handful of materials and are therefore sold as one-size-fits-all solutions. The complexities of contaminated water, however, may require a more customized approach, and Dr. McCutcheon and his team are working to produce membranes from never-before-used materials, which would provide specific selectivity and permeance performance to fit new use cases.
On receiving the Paul L. Busch Award, McCutcheon said, “Our manufacturing innovation could represent the first step change in membrane manufacturing technology in over four decades. Our process can enable many new materials to be made into functional membranes for water treatment at scale and offer unprecedented customizability of membrane properties for emergent water treatment processes. I am grateful to my current and past students who have worked exceptionally hard to make this technology a reality and to WRF for seeing the possibility of what we can accomplish.”
The Paul L. Busch Award is made possible by the Endowment for Innovation in Applied Water Quality Research and has provided $2.3 million in funding to up-and-coming researchers making major breakthroughs in the water quality industry. More information about the Paul L. Busch Award can be found on WRF’s website.