Water isn鈥檛 just the most important substance on Earth. It鈥檚 also an astonishingly complicated one. Too much can be just as big a problem as not enough.
A new initiative at St. Louis University aims to tackle some of the biggest problems surrounding water, and to do it across disciplines. The Water Access, Technology, Environment and Resources Institute, better known by its apropos acronym WATER Institute, launched last month with funds from the SLU Research Institute.
The WATER Institute鈥檚 new director, Amanda Cox, is also a professor of civil engineering at SLU. She explained on St. Louis on the Air that the initiative is the result of a 鈥淏ig Ideas鈥� competition at the university, aimed at identifying university-wide research priorities.
Prior to the competition, Cox said, 鈥渨e had a number of exceptional faculty doing water-related research, and several of them were already doing collaborative projects. We came up with the idea for the WATER Institute to leverage our expertise even more towards collaborative efforts.鈥�
It already has multiple projects underway, with three key, interlocking areas of focus: developing clean water access at home and in the developing world, protecting aquatic ecosystems and improving water infrastructure.
Rachel Rimmerman, the institute鈥檚 administrative director, explained that the coronavirus pandemic led to a brief pause in plans to launch, and led to some changes. But it didn鈥檛 delay things much.
鈥淪t. Louis University is working on the forefront of the COVID-19 vaccine and treatment investigations as well,鈥� she explained. 鈥淏ut we also recognize that water is a huge issue that will be ongoing that we need to continue paying attention to. We really wanted to be able to start moving forward with things.鈥�
She added, 鈥淲ater is so fundamental, it also plays a role in how we respond to this pandemic. It鈥檚 really connected to all the different critical issues going on in our world today.鈥�
鈥�鈥� brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is hosted by and produced by , , , and . The audio engineer is .
Send questions and comments about this story to feedback@stlpublicradio.org.
