The Freshwater Collaborative invests in projects that train undergraduate students while fostering partnerships among academia and industry. Faculty and students can provide research and development support to companies. Businesses may hire students for temporary work to boost their staffing.
Below you’ll find a few of our case studies. If you are interested in working with faculty or hiring students to complement your business needs, reach out to us at freshwater-collab@uwm.edu. We are happy to connect you to potential academic partners.
You can also use our Experts Directory to identify faculty you may wish to collaborative with.
Chippewa Valley Bean
A partnership between Chippewa Valley Bean and UW-Stout is developing precision agricultural tools that will lower economic risk for growers who want to expand into kidney bean crops.
Through the Crop Per Drop project, funded by the Freshwater Collaborative, faculty and students have developed mathematical models for more efficiently growing kidney beans. Similar to models used for large-scale crops, these tools will help Wisconsin kidney bean growers increase their crop yield and decrease water usage.
Jacobs Engineering
A partnership between Jacobs Engineering and the Freshwater Collaborative helped Jacobs to quickly hire students from the Universities of Wisconsin to work on the WDNR’s Service Line Inventory Technical Assistance project.
Students supplemented Jacobs staffing resources and were trained to provide technical assistance to help community water systems meet the EPA’s deadline for providing inventory of Wisconsin’s lead service lines.
Sadoff Iron & Metal Company
UW Oshkosh faculty and students are developing an on-site method to help Sadoff Iron & Metal Company clean contaminated water that results from the scrap metal collection process.
A grant from the Freshwater Collaborative helped UW Oshkosh hire undergraduate students to conduct pilot studies to test various processes of contaminant removal. Faculty continue to fine-tune the process.
Results look promising and would save Sadoff money, and reduce their carbon footprint while protecting the environment.