This month the Water Center turns 5. The community-focused water policy and research center, based in the School of Arts & Sciences, has connections with students, staff, and faculty across the 12 schools at the University of Pennsylvania.

With its focus on sustainability and equity, Water Center executive director Howard Neukrug says the Center works to foster collaborations between academics, industry leaders, and communities to produce the next generation of water leaders. “Our projects have to ring a bell with the community,” says Neukrug, who, before coming to Penn in 2017, was commissioner and CEO of Philadelphia Water.

As a hub for water innovation and leadership, the Water Center has made strides towards these goals in its first five years.
“Five years is not a long time in the context of a university as old as Penn, but the Water Center’s done a tremendous amount in that time to really establish itself as one of the leading academic water centers in the country,” says Scott Moore, Water Center senior advisor and director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives at Penn Global.

Addressing community water needs
At its heart, the Water Center bridges academic research and community needs.

“Making our cities, towns, and communities resilient to threats including drought, extreme storms, sea level rise, climate uncertainty, and aging infrastructure requires us to think in an integrated and sustainable way with other community issues such as housing, jobs, crime and education,” Neukrug says.”

The Water Center has a number of completed and ongoing projects to improve water access and equity locally and across the eastern United States. Projects include identifying actions to improve recreational water quality of the Delaware River, developing a management strategy for equity-based stormwater management in Pittsburgh, and a long-term commitment to Cobbs Creek, an urban waterway with substantial wetlands that separates Philadelphia and Delaware counties.

“Cobbs Creek is one of our nation’s more polluted urban waterways,” Neukrug says. “Working at the Creek with experts and the community, you have to first ask why this stream is like this.” He says if you compare it to a successful urban waterway like Wissahickon Creek the disparity is clear. “It really comes down to issues of environmental justice, equity, and money.”

This summer, Bo Nash, a Water Center research fellow and second-year student in the Master of Environmental Studies (MES) program, took on the full-time role of Cobbs Creek program coordinator. In this role, Nash is conducting a water quality monitoring project, the results of which will be more transparent and publicly accessible than previous monitoring efforts.

“We want to understand what the quality of Cobbs Creek is actually like. Is it safe to fish and eat the fish out of there, and is it safe to even go walking there because it’s easily accessible by the public?” Nash says.

Nash also helped host this year’s Cobbs Creek Summer Enrichment program, which introduces students from Paul Robeson High School in West Philadelphia to water and environmental research. He plans to continue working with the Water Center at Cobbs Creek this coming semester.