Three CoE Faculty Members Obtain CAFE Grants

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Lauren Andrews, Caitlyn Butler, Chul Park

Three UMass Amherst College of Engineering (CoE) faculty members – Assistant Professor Lauren Andrews of the Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department and Professors Caitlyn Butler and Chul Park of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department – have each received grants of up to $100,000 from the Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (CAFE). The CoE researchers are the principal investigators (PIs) for three interdisciplinary research teams developing collaborative projects in sustainable agriculture, food systems, and/or climate resilience.

“The grants were made possible through federal Hatch Capacity funds, whose purpose is to facilitate research across the land-grant-university system focused on a broad range of topics related to agriculture, food systems, and human health,” says Lynne McLandsborough, interim director of CAFE. 

Andrews received her CAFE grant for a project on “Optimizing Rhizobacteria for Microbial Sequestration of Heavy Metal Contaminants to Mitigate Uptake from Soil by Food Crops.” Her three co-PIs are: Matthew Moore, the Eric A. Decker Scholar and an associate professor in the Department of Food Science; Baoshan Xing, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture; and Jason White, Director of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and adjunct faculty in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture.

According to the team’s CAFE proposal, “This project will establish a novel rhizobacterial platform to reduce toxic heavy metals in food crops using a variety of approaches from microbial synthetic and systems biology.”

As Andrews and her colleagues explain, their research “leverages recently developed tools for programming diverse bacteria from the Andrews Lab and our discoveries of transferable genetic-design rules to soil bacteria.” 

As the proposal summarizes the research, “Combined, this project aims to [transform] the use of engineered rhizobacteria for enhancing food-crop nutrition and has the potential to create a new paradigm to address major challenges in agricultural food production and food safety.” 

Butler is the PI on a project titled “Recovering Fertilizers from Freshwater Bodies Impacted by Agricultural Runoff Using a Novel Biofilm System and Repurposing the Recovered Nutrients for Agricultural Use.” Her two co-PIs are Assistant Professor Ashley Keiser of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture and Postdoctoral Research Associate Ahmed Abouhend of CEE. 

As the Butler team explains, “To address the urgent need for sustainable nutrient recovery, the Butler Research Group has recently developed an innovative biofilm-based system capable of not only removing nutrients from freshwater bodies impacted by agricultural and stormwater runoff but also recovering them in a form of a concentrate that contains 100-to-500 times higher-nutrient concentration than from the contaminated source. The research is an important validation that this team seeks to demonstrate the use of this concentrate as a fertilizer for food crops.”

The Butler research team concludes that recovering nitrogen from these waters can offer a dual benefit: “providing an eco-friendly alternative to synthetic fertilizers and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Park is the PI for a project known as “Environmental and Economic Benefits from an Innovative Treatment of Food Waste Digestate.” Park is collaborating with two co-PIs: Postdoctoral Researcher Joseph Gikonyo of CEE and Professor Klaus Nüsslein from the Department of Microbiology.

The purpose of this research is to develop an effective method to treat products from the anaerobic digestion of food wastes (called “digestate”), which can specifically neutralize the nitrous-oxide gas bi-produced during the treatment of digestate. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that is 270-times more potent than carbon dioxide. 

“To address the digestate-nitrogen challenge,” as the CAFE proposal says, “this interdisciplinary research proposes to treat digestate using a novel bioprocess based on hybridizing oxygenic photogranules (OPGs) with bacterial anaerobic-ammonia oxidation (anammox).”

According to the CAFE proposal, “We hypothesize that combined communities of nitrifiers and annamox bacteria within the layered structure of OPGs are responsible for consuming nitrous oxide generated by nitrification and denitrification during the treatment of food-waste digestate.”  

Park and his colleagues say that food waste is the largest component of municipal solid waste landfilled in the United States – for instance, the total generation of food waste in 2019 was 106-million tons – and a very significant source of greenhouse gases. (June 2025)