A Great Lakes coalition that wants to turn the region into a hub for water innovation has won a grant of up to $160 million over 10 years from the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of its NSF Regional Innovation Engines program.
Great Lakes ReNew, a six-state collaboration, was one of 10 teams selected for the award, which includes up to $1.6 billion in nationwide investment across the next decade in semiconductor research and development. Each of the 10 groups will receive up to $15 million for two years to start.
It is one of the single largest investments in place-based research in the nation's history.
The collaboration will be coordinated by Current, a Chicago-based water innovation hub, in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago and more than 50 partner organizations, and will use the funding to spur economic growth through Great Lakes ReNew.
"We have all the research and commercialization strengths here in the Great Lakes region to become a water innovation superhighway," said Junhong Chen, co-principal investigator of Great Lakes ReNew, in a statement. Chen is also a professor at UChicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the lead water strategist at Argonne National Laboratory. "Now we can start building it."
The initiative hopes to find new ways to recover and reuse water, energy, nutrients and critical materials from water. For example, by removing dangerous chemicals like lithium from wastewater, ReNew aims to attract new American manufacturers to the area to reuse these materials for things like batteries and fertilizers.
ReNew's application for the NSF engine program was backed by Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin, and Illinois has committed an additional $2 million in state funding.
