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Freshwater Science ISSUE
INSIDE STORY | PAGE 07
Startup Stars: Arizona Innovation Challenge Awardees profiled
Arizona: Where innovators turn for what’s next.
Something big, bold and exciting is happening in the Grand Canyon state. Cutting-edge companies are launching, testing and scaling new technologies in Arizona. Our culture of innovation, highly skilled talent pool, lean regulatory environment, and affordable operating costs provide the perfect platform for business growth and success. Beyond being a place where you can achieve your professional goals, Arizona also provides a lifestyle that allows you to achieve your personal goals. With year-round sunshine, endless outdoor activities, and a positive outlook, we play as hard as we work. It’s this perfect balance that makes life better here.
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THE
Freshwater Science ISSUE
IN THIS ISSUE
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Not a Drop in the Bucket Publisher’s Letter
Quenching the World’s Thirst Arizona’s expertise could help solve global water challenges
07
Startup Stars
12
What Are They Worth?
Arizona Innovation Challenge Awardees profiled
Assigning value to spring ecosystems to enhance policymaking, land management
SUMMER 2022
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Rainforest Under Glass Study of simulated ‘drought’ offers glimpse of what lies ahead
Joining Forces Center of Innovation opens incubator outpost at Biosphere 2
Sensing Danger Research seeks to empower utilities for more targeted wildfire response
A Thin Line Even normal weight is no guarantee against severe fatty liver disease
PUBLISHERS Sandra Watson Steven G. Zylstra EDITOR Don Rodriguez EXECUTIVE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Alyssa Tufts CREATIVE DIRECTOR Michael Carmigiano
EMAIL techconnect@aztechcouncil.org For queries or customer service, call 602-343-8324 View more of TechConnect: aztechcouncil.org/techconnect TechConnect is published by the Arizona Technology Council, 2800 N. Central Ave. #1530, Phoenix, AZ 85004 Entire contents copyright 2022, Arizona Technology Council. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Products named in these page pages are trade names or trademarks of their respective companies. Publication of TechConnect is supported by the Arizona Commerce Authority.
P ubl is her ’s Let t er
TechConnect | SUMMER 2022 | 03
THE FRESHWATER SCIENCE ISSUE
NOT A DROP IN THE BUCKET In a modern world, these facts cited by the National Academy of Engineering still seem staggering: • Globally, about one of every six people living today does not have adequate access to water. • Lack of clean water is responsible for more deaths in the world than war. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that one of the Grand Challenges for Engineering is “Provide access to clean water.” With a drought looming through Arizona and neighboring states, we no longer can take what comes out of the faucet for granted. Lack of this precious commodity is very much a possibility for us and not just limited to other places on earth. But thanks to science, we don’t have to just idly stand by and wait for the last drop. Freshwater is considered water with low concentrations of dissolved solids. For the most part, those solids have been salt since that is what 97% of water on our planet contains. That in itself makes the remaining 3% critical to protect. If we want freshwater to be forever, we can’t afford to let it be polluted with chemicals considered to have the same indefinite lifespan. Frequently referred to as “forever chemicals,” per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group used to make products that resist heat, oil, stains, grease and water. Since they don’t decompose in the environment and can move through soil, it’s no surprise PFAS contaminate drinking water sources. In fact, one drop can contaminate 18 million gallons of drinking water! Add to that the Environmental Protection Agency has identified multiple sites in our state that have PFAS contamination.
Steven G. Zylstra is president and CEO of the Arizona Technology Council and SciTech Institute.
Thankfully, The University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University in partnership with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality are working to create cost-effective technologies to measure and remove PFAS compounds from water. This project uses advanced sponges called sorbents that can be modified to remove all types of PFAS from water under a wide range of conditions. The sponges are constructed from low-cost, environmentally friendly materials (e.g., cellulose) and are regenerable. Sensors also are used to provide real-time monitoring of PFAS concentrations during operation, allowing fast adjustments to optimize the treatment system. It may seem ironic that a state considered by many outside our borders to be an unforgiving desert wasteland would be home to a movement of preserving and providing freshwater for entire populations across the globe. This is but one example of freshwater science at work. Please look through the pages that follow to learn what else is happening here in this sector. Many are much farther along than the project headed by UArizona and NAU, and we already are experiencing their impact. In the meantime, I encourage you to do your part to conserve water when you can, especially as we deal with the summer heat. Consider yourself a citizen scientist who can help keep the tap running for years to come.
QUENCHING THE WORLD’S THIRST SOURCE hydropanels
Arizona’s rapidly growing technology sphere includes industries like semiconductors, electric vehicles, automated vehicles, batteries, quantum computing and more. But just one of these growing industries can claim a nearly 2,000-year history in the state: freshwater science. Beginning about A.D. 100, the Hohokam people, who farmed and lived in central and southern Arizona, developed one of the world’s most advanced most advanced irrigation systems, one that stretched hundreds of miles and supported a thriving civilization. Nearly 2,000 years later, the Hohokam’s engineering marvel makes up the groundwork of Arizona’s modern water delivery system. Bolstered by a sophisticated network of dams, reservoirs and canals, the metro areas of Phoenix and Tucson today support approximately 6 million people and growing.
Advances in water efficiency and conservation mean the state uses less water than it did in 1957 — with seven times the population and 19 times the economy. Arizona continues to drive innovation in freshwater science.
Water Research The University of Arizona has been at the forefront of water research for years. Today, nearly 300 faculty and researchers specialize in water topics. The university also creates new technologies for water treatment, reuse and management. Industry partnerships help the university’s water experts pilot new technologies in biofuel production, water-efficient manufacturing and more.
At Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, Cody Friesen has discovered a way to create water out of thin air. Friesen’s company, SOURCE Global (formerly Zero Mass Water), makes the SOURCE hydropanel that can be installed at any location in the world with access to sunlight. The solarpowered device extracts water vapor from the air to generate a sustainable supply of pure drinking water while eliminating the need for power from an electric grid. “We created SOURCE to perfect water for every person, every place, including those who have no water in their homes, who are dealing with contamination, aging infrastructure and shrinking water supplies,” says Friesen, a senior Global Futures scientist at ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.
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Arizona’s expertise could help solve global water challenges
OnePointOne vertical-plane aeroponics
From its Scottsdale headquarters, SOURCE Global has helped bring fresh drinking water to some of the most parched places on earth, including native communities in Australia and desert regions in sub-Saharan Africa. The company operates in 52 countries and on six continents.
One of the many Israeli-based companies operating in Arizona since 2015 is N Drip, which has invented a gravity-fed irrigation system for farming operations, eliminating the need for expensive pumps, filtration systems and electricity required by traditional drip systems.
In addition, The University of Arizona’s Water & Energy Sustainable Technology (WEST) Center launched in 2015 is pioneering research in desalination systems, wastewater treatment and monitoring, and contaminant removal. In 2020, the center developed novel procedures to test for COVID-19 in wastewater, technology that helped provide early detection of asymptomatic cases around the state.
Through partnerships with Central Arizona Project, the Colorado River Indian Tribes and The University of Arizona, the N Drip systems are delivering up to 50% water savings with increased crop yields.
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Water Innovation Arizona is also attracting water innovators. In Avondale, agritech company OnePointOne last year launched a 50,000-square-foot vertical farm that uses 99% less land and water than traditional agriculture. “We are on a path to fundamentally rethink how plants are grown, utilized and optimized,” CEO Sam Bertram says. Helping drive innovation from a statewide level is Gov. Doug Ducey, who made water a top priority upon entering office. Speaking to the Water Technology and Environment Control (WATEC) Exhibition in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2015, Ducey stated, “We know that we can share technology, best management practices, planning methodologies and information in partnership with Israel to address our challenges and improve our sustainable water future.” That partnership is already bearing fruit.
In 2019, Ducey’s leadership brought together more than 40 water stakeholders from around the state to pass the the Drought Contingency Plan, a blueprint for storing more water in Lake Mead. In his most recent executive budget proposal, the governor calls for a generational investment of $1 billion to secure Arizona’s water future for the next 100 years through new water sources and integrating new technologies, including desalination.
Working together, Arizona’s innovators and policy experts are pioneering some of the most advanced water innovations anywhere in the world. If Arizona’s unique history and makeup provide any insights, there may be no better place to develop solutions for this global challenge.”
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STARTUP STARS
Each year, the Arizona Commerce Authority’s Arizona Innovation Challenge (AIC) awards up to $150,000 to the most innovative companies seeking to commercialize new technology that creates sustainable and growing businesses in the state of Arizona. Winning companies leverage their awards to grow their businesses and facilitate the state’s economic development goals. The AIC has been serving Arizona’s startup ecosystem since 2011, resulting in more than 2,000 applications and 110 awarded companies that are striving to become the industry giants of tomorrow.
As a follow-up to five awardees profiled in the previous issue of TechConnect, we feature five additional 2021 Arizona Innovation Challenge awardees.
protected by more than 20 patents (including pending patents), and its clients include more than half the top 10 global carmakers. “We found an unmet market need for high performance and cost-effective solid-state battery materials for use in next-gen battery energy storage applications. There was almost no serious supplier of such products on the market, and this is still true even today,” said co-founder and CEO Sumin Zhu. “We decided to work on developing these products and taking them to the market by forming our own startup company.”
Ampcera co-founder and CEO Sumin Zhu
Ampcera: Driving the next big idea in EV battery technology
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BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes, Toyota and Volkswagen. These are just a few of the big automakers that have publicly announced plans to develop an emerging technology known as “solid-state batteries” in their electric vehicle fleets. Those in the industry predict solid-state batteries will be a game changer for the $175 billion EV battery market because they charge faster, deliver longer drive ranges and offer greater safety than liquid lithium-ion batteries. At the forefront of this next-gen technology is Ampcera, whose team of engineers and scientists in Tucson is developing and commercializing solid-state battery materials and cells for electric vehicles and consumer electronics. Since launching the company in 2017, Ampcera has quickly become a major developer and supplier of the critical solid-state battery materials on the global market. Ampcera’s technology is
The company was named a 2021 awardee of the Arizona Innovation Challenge (AIC), the Arizona Commerce Authority’s business-plan competition for emerging tech-andinnovation startups. The AIC competition, one of the largest competitions of its kind in the country, presented an opportunity for Zhu and his team to improve the company through real-world mentoring. “It was valuable for us in that it helped us to refine our business plan, talent plan and financial model,” he said of the rigorous steps throughout the competition. “The AIC program and ACA are very helpful to our team. The whole program is very well organized.” Ampcera is also a recipient of multiple grants from the U.S. Department of Energy. Among one of these projects, Ampcera is partnering with General Motors and the University of California, San Diego to develop a next-gen battery for electric cars. While headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zhu foresees the vast majority of Ampcera’s growth to be at its research and development lab and advanced manufacturing facility in Tucson, where it plans to triple its workforce to 30 employees in 2022. Zhu said most of those new employees will be higher-level scientists and engineers. Besides a near-perfect dry climate for battery production, Zhu sees Arizona’s business-friendly environment and its leadership position as an electric vehicle hub as positives for Ampcera’s growth trajectory.
“We see great potential in scaling up manufacturing in Arizona. It is very business friendly, there is a strong talent pool and it has many cost advantages,” Zhu said. “The presence of an EV supply chain in Arizona is also very attractive for our future business development.”an incredible feeling to benefit everyone involved.”
Shaw says these typically smaller, independent agents—those not affiliated with the giant insurance companies—are hungry for tech-enabled services to increase sales, manage policies and save time. Shaw and his partners “kind of fell into the insurance space” when working for another tech firm. “We realized we were implementing the same six, seven or eight pieces of software aimed at solving the same problem (in the insurance industry),” Shaw recalls. “We said, ‘Let’s just build that into one platform.’ And that’s what we’ve been focused on the past two years at Better Agency.” Shaw and his team are hyperfocused on the independent insurance market because, as a general rule, they don’t have the same access to technology and resources as the insurance giants. “We are looking to remedy that,” Shaw said.
Better Agency: Tech solution for independent insurance agents Will Shaw comes from good lineage in the Arizona startup space. He landed his first tech job at Keap (formerly Infusionsoft), a pioneer of the Arizona SaaS space, where Shaw worked for different teams at the now Inc. 5000 company with a national footprint. Later, Shaw’s startup, Better Agency, closed a $1.6 million seed investment from Gregg Scoresby’s PHX Ventures. Scoresby’s CampusLogic was also one of early innovators on the Arizona tech scene and a national success story in the EdTech space. This heritage leaves the Better Agency in good company. But the idea behind the company may prove to be its greatest asset. Shaw and his team have identified a vastly underserved slice of the insurance market: the 40,000 independent agents in the U.S. who sell property and casualty policies and services.
At the heart of the Better Agency’s technology is its exclusive all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) platform that allows agents to use a plug-and-play system that automizes sales, services, renewals and claims. The AIC process helped fine-tune Better Agency’s business plan and story, Shaw says. “It’s a really valuable way for business owners prepping for fundraising who are looking for real feedback,” he says, “whether it’s how to properly tell your story or whether its recruiting talent, recruiting venture capital or recruiting customers.” Shaw is thrilled to be joining Arizona’s powerful tech ecosystem as a growing founder. The company is increasing sales month to month—growing revenue by 10% each month— and plans to double its workforce in 2022. Better Agency currently has 17 employees. “There is a lot of talent out here,” he says, “whether you are in the SaaS space, the engineering space, the manufacturing space or the automobile space. There is no shortage of talent.”
TechConnect | SUMMER 2022 | 08
Better Agency founder Will Shaw
Better Agency was named a 2021 awardee of the Arizona Innovation Challenge (AIC), the Arizona Commerce Authority’s business-plan competition for emerging tech-andinnovation startups.
STARTUP STARS
Bluetail CEO Robert Guerrieri Bluetail: Bringing aircraft records into the digital age Robert Guerrieri and Stuart Illian identified the need. Then they let their potential customers guide the solution. It paid off. After just two years, Bluetail Inc.’s cloud-based records system now manages records for $1 billion worth of aircraft. The company just raised $2.1 million in Series A funding. And it is among the 2021 awardees of the Arizona Innovation Challenge (AIC). “Our customers are defining our product, and it’s really refreshing,” Guerrieri says. “Yeah, we know a lot about the space and we know a lot about software, but when customers help build your product for you, the product truly comes to life.” Records are vital in the aviation industry. Every aircraft must have logbooks tracking its maintenance history from day one. If the records—mostly on paper—are lost, the plane cannot fly.
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“I couldn’t believe you could have a $50 million airplane and still have paper records,” Guerrieri said. “Why hadn’t someone pushed the digital transformation?” This digital transformation was Bluetail’s goal. It solved the problem in two ways: • Digitizing records at more than 120 contracted scanning centers nationwide. • Storing records in a fully searchable, intuitive, cloud-based application. A four-engine commercial airliner may have 10 gigabytes of data attached to it. Bluetail handles that with ease. “It’s built to scale for the corporate world. There’s a lot of horsepower in the proverbial engine,” Illian says.
Bluetail COO Stuart Illian
Equally important is a fast search tool called MACH that can easily sort through those gigabytes for any search term, including in handwritten documents. The software also autoorganizes complex maintenance forms—another industry first. “Aircraft maintenance people love it,” Illian says. Bluetail initially targeted owner pilots and small flight departments, but the larger business aviation sector eventually took notice of its innovative solution. “I didn’t think we’d hit the nerve of Fortune 500 companies so fast,” Guerrieri says, noting that they’re now signing operators with 20 to 40 planes. “We have started to become a real and serious company,” he says. Bluetail grew 700% in 2021 and expects to do the same this year. Being an AIC finalist was important. Guerrieri and Illian are seasoned entrepreneurs, but having other people ask tough questions was helpful. “They’d done their homework. I could tell they were really looking out for us,” Illian says. Guerrieri and Illian worked together at Apple, served on each other’s boards and always talked about starting a company together. The timing finally worked out. Guerrieri, who moved to Arizona 20 years ago, had just left WebPT, which digitizes records for physical therapists. Illian had sold his aviation businesses in California and moved to Arizona. They credit the company’s success partly to how well they work together. Starting the company in Arizona was a plus as well. “In the Bay Area, we’d get lost in all the tech noise,” Guerrieri says. And Illian adds: “Everyone is behind you here. You’re not fighting headwinds. If we had tried to do this in California, let’s just say it would have been more challenging.”
Dorm Room Movers: Founder soars with student-moving company
company. Dorm Room Movers bundles enough of the small jobs to get them on a truck. Students pay by the box, rather than the industry standard of paying for time. “We productized a service,” says Lapid, who eventually took the leap of faith and left Honeywell to work on the company full time.
Leor Lapid planned to be an engineer like his father. He earned his mechanical engineering degree at Arizona State University and landed internships and eventually a job in Honeywell’s aerospace division.
The company is lean, with a dozen full-time employees supplemented by 40 to 50 call-center agents during the peak college moving season. “It all comes to a head at the same time,” Lapid said. “Technology allows us to streamline the process.”
Yet he’d also had a dream of working for himself. And when a college friend couldn’t find an easy way to store his belongings over the summer, the dream had something to latch onto. The idea for Dorm Room Movers was born.
Technology is also part of diversifying. A new division of the company, SpaceShip, provides storage solutions by the box for people who don’t need a full storage unit. And down the road, Lapid sees another vertical in licensing the company’s technology.
More than a decade later, after serving 76,000 students on nearly 200 prep school and college campuses, the company is a 2021 awardee of the Arizona Innovation Challenge (AIC), the Arizona Commerce Authority’s business-plan competition for innovative startups. “We still view ourselves as a startup,” Lapid says. “We feel we’ve barely scratched the surface.” There have been plenty of learning experiences since those early days when Lapid took vacation time from Honeywell to join co-founder Matthew Grossman and their fraternity brothers as movers. “We recognized that wasn’t scalable,” he says. The solution came by contracting with professional moving companies to pick up boxes. Dorm Room Movers—which Lapid came to recognize was a tech firm at heart—works with clients and schedules the move. The company created software that handles customer interactions, routes and tracks boxes, and manages inventory. Movers use a mobile app provided by the company to document and take pictures when they pick up items. The clients—students—benefit in several ways. Any individual move is too small to be of interest to traditional a moving
The Innovation Challenge will help Dorm Room Movers achieve its goals, Lapid says. “We’re getting involved in the tech community in Arizona,” Lapid says. “Learning from the mentors was one of our main interests in participating. They opened our eyes to key metrics we should be observing, as well as pointing out key opportunities for scaling and growth.” For instance, the mentors urged him to track repeat customers, the foundation of any business’ success. Until then, Lapid had merely smiled when seeing familiar names come up. The Innovation Challenge grant will help the company add resources for growth. Until now, the company has been bootstrapped, initially by Lapid and Grossman then through Small Business Administration loans. The AIC award is the first outside investment the company has received.
TechConnect | SUMMER 2022 | 10
Dorm Room Movers CEO Leor Lapid
STARTUP STARS
VIVAHR CEO Ryan Naylor
VIVAHR: Passion to help job seekers leads to small-business hiring software Every company has a corporate culture. Some spell out their core values on their websites. That’s all good, but it doesn’t go far enough, says Ryan Naylor. What job seekers really need to know is a company’s microculture, he says.
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“What does a day in the life of that job look like?” Naylor says. “If you’re a diesel mechanic, you don’t care about the ping-pong table outside the CEO’s office. You care if there’s air conditioning and a soda machine that is well stocked and priced.” He calls telling this story “culture marketing,” and it’s at the core of his startup VIVAHR, which created a job-posting platform and “applicant tracking system” (ATS) specifically designed for small businesses. The company is an awardee of the 2021 Arizona Innovation Challenge, the Arizona Commerce Authority’s business-plan competition for innovative startups. VIVAHR clients sign up primarily because the software makes it easy to post job listings to multiple sites then manage candidates. But the No.1 reason clients stay with VIVAHR is because it allows employers to tell their “culture story.” “Most companies don’t think about it, but once they do, they can’t leave,” Naylor says. “It’s too impactful to their business.”
VIVAHR enables an employer to post openings to more than 50 job boards with one click, manage candidates, and maintain contact with past and current candidates. It is targeted to businesses with five to 50 employees. Naylor sat side-by-side with small-business owners over two years to understand their needs and procedures so he could design a package that worked for them. He jettisoned the extra— and expensive—bells and whistles found in most ATS software. About 1,000 companies nationwide have used VIVAHR. Naylor traces his passion for helping people find jobs to some of the lower points in his life. He and his mother went through a period of instability after his father left them. Understanding that financial stress can tear families apart, he dedicated himself to helping job seekers, first with Local Work and now with VIVAHR. Arizona’s large number of small businesses (nearly 100,000 have fewer than 20 employees) made this a good place to start the business, Naylor said. “Our customer base is here. To call someone and sit in their office the same day, that’s an incredible value,” he says. The company is self-funded, and Naylor has no plans to seek investors. A high retention rate and low cost of customer acquisition creates the income to support seven full-time employees. The grant that comes with being an AIC awardee will help Naylor hire more qualified staff, and in turn help other companies fill their job openings. “The companies that can emotionally connect with job candidates will win,” Naylor says. “It’s about how you showcase you trust them and can give them a place to have success.”
Assigning value to spring ecosystems to enhance policymaking, land management An ambitious project recently launched at Northern Arizona University will capture the “voice of the people” in determining the value of protecting a range of spring-based ecosystems in the Coconino and Kaibab National Forests. Led by professor Julie Mueller, an economist, the multidisciplinary team includes professor Abe Springer, a hydrogeologist; assistant professor Ryan Fitch, an environmental and developmental economist; graduate student Katelyn LaPine, a geologist and geographic information system specialist; and graduate student Andrew Lewis, an economist and geologist. Fitch explains the main goal of the project is to answer the question,
“Are there better ways to manage these springs relative to what society might want?”
Professor Abe Springer (right) and graduate assistant Andrew Lewis
The team is developing a nationwide survey with the input of stakeholders who utilize the springs, including ranchers, Arizona Game and Fish Department and U.S. Forest Service professionals, and several Native groups. The questionnaire will be organized around key motivators identified during stakeholder meetings, including cultural significance, climate change resilience, recreational use, biodiversity, biological habitat and flow rate. While the feedback reflects disparate interests, Lewis says, “most people want sustainability, whether they realize it or not. For example, ranchers may want that water source to survive and be continually healthy for their cattle while someone from Game and Fish wants to ensure hunting and fishing permits can continue to be sold. Boiling it down, a lot of people have the same interests even if they’re from different groups.” On the survey, people can choose attributes that are correlated with the dollar amount that is most important to them. The study also draws on Springer’s research, including 20 years of data on spring ecosystems in northern Arizona. LaPine will use this long-term data plus the values from the survey to create management recommendations for the spring ecosystems. “I’ll create a hot-spot map to see which springs have the most value and where we could allocate, for example, different grazing lands,” she says. Estimating values for natural resources provides a useful way to discuss something complex—like an ecosystem—in the more easily understood framework of numbers and economics.
Professor Julie Mueller “When we can put dollars and cents on things, from a policy perspective, it’s easier to make decisions on costs and benefits,” he says. “Many of the benefits we receive from natural resources don’t have an economic value, such as the aesthetics for the San Francisco Peaks or the water coming out of the Inner Basin to Flagstaff.”
“If we can start looking at those other social benefits that we receive, I think we’re going to be able to make progress in convincing policymakers why some of these projects are important to undertake,” Fitch says. Ultimately, the team hopes to generate nationwide interest in these critical Arizona water resources and increase their protection. Katie Wall is a content creator and Kerry Bennett is a science writer for Northern Arizona University.
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BY KATIE WALL AND KERRY BENNETT
WHAT ARE THEY WORTH?
BY ROSEMARY BRANDT
RAINFOREST UNDER GLASS Study of simulated ‘drought’ offers glimpse of what lies ahead
In the sprawling Southern Arizona desert an hour’s drive north of Tucson, the sun peeked through the 90-foot canopy of tropical trees as researchers turned the main water valve and released what would amount to 12,000 gallons of water—the first rain in more than two months for the 30-year-old rainforest at Biosphere 2. This project is designed to simulate a full ecosystem drought and recovery, one that researchers hope will help paint a clearer picture of how a hotter, drier future will impact the world’s rainforests.
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“This is the hottest tropical rainforest in the world, making it an ecosystem laboratory for studying how forests respond to the combined pressures of warming and drought,” says Laura Meredith, rainforest science director for Biosphere 2 and one of three leads on the international project. “We are attempting to monitor from top to bottom—from soils to canopy—the resiliency and vulnerability of plants, microbes and their interactions to environmental stress,” adds Meredith, an assistant professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment and member of the BIO5 Institute and Institute of the Environment. The Water, Atmosphere, and Life Dynamics (B2 WALD) experiment bridges borders in the ever-pressing challenge to understand the implications of global climate change. Fueled in part by a $2.1 million European Research Council grant, the B2 WALD project brings together 80 scientists and equipment from 13 institutions across the globe. As the climate changes and temperatures rise, the fate of rainforests is more important than ever. Rainforests play one
From left: University of Freiburg postdoctoral fellow Ines Bamberger, UArizona assistant professor Laura Meredith and Biosphere 2 research specialist Jason Deleeuw enjoy the first drops of rain after a two-month rainforest drought.
of the most significant roles in the Earth’s carbon cycle, largely regulating the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. “We do know that global climate change is progressing. We don’t understand how ecosystems are going to behave,” says Joaquin Ruiz, vice president of global environmental futures at The University of Arizona. “Rainforests are important for two reasons. One, they store a fair amount of carbon, and you don’t want that carbon pumped into the atmosphere. And the second is they are home to enormous biodiversity.”
The rainforest at Biosphere 2, which houses 90 plant species across an area the size of seven tennis courts, is a unique tool researchers are harnessing to bridge the gap between what they can do in the lab and what they observe in the field. Prior to shutting off the rain this fall, researchers set out to capture every bit of data possible. Nearly 2 miles of Teflon tubing and more than 133 sensors were placed throughout the forest to simultaneously collect measurements on everything from carbon pools in the atmosphere and vegetation to microbiome and deep-water soil processes. “We want to know how drought changes the speed of carbon cycling in forest ecosystems. Additionally, we want to understand how plants and microbes choose to ‘spend’ their carbon in drought versus non-drought periods,” Meredith says. As the rainforest readjusts to rain, the marathon continues. Researchers will track system changes throughout the rainforest’s recovery, after which begins the real work: mulling through the data. The project has gathered more than three terabytes of atmospheric gas data to date. Rosemary Brandt is director of external communications at The University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
BY JESSA TURNER
Center of Innovation opens incubator outpost at Biosphere 2 The University of Arizona Center for Innovation (UACI) has launched its new startup incubator at Biosphere 2 to support renewable energy and sustainable tech startups. UACI at Biosphere 2 was launched with four startups, all of which will go through UACI’s structured 27-point road map that takes them through a continuum of education provided by mentors, advisers and community collaborators. Entrepreneurs will use various physical spaces at Biosphere 2 that allow them to test and demonstrate the tech in specific environments. Biosphere 2 serves as a laboratory for controlled scientific studies, an arena for scientific discovery and discussion, and a far-reaching provider of public education. Its ability to combine varying scales, precise manipulation and fine monitoring together in controlled experiments provides scientists with the unique opportunity to explore complex environmental questions. The four startups now working at the new Biosphere 2 incubator are: •
SolarSpace: A solar energy company looking to harness solar power from highly concentrated photovoltaic systems that take less space and capture more energy than traditional panels.
• Tectonicus: Another solar company whose projects include a plan to build solar panel arrays over irrigation canals, which the company calls a “solar river.”
• Red Sea Farms: A technology company dedicated to enabling sustainable agriculture in harsh environments. • Over the Sun: A company that uses computer software, documentary film and other resources to build platforms for research and science education.
UACI is Arizona’s leading startup incubator with a network with 72 companies in the program and locations across Southern Arizona. UACI offers leaders of science and technology startups the benefit of connections with UArizona experts, incubation programs and the office and lab space needed to turn ideas and inventions into scalable and sustainable businesses that ultimately provide high-paying jobs and fuel Southern Arizona’s economy. UACI and Biosphere 2 united to provide the ideal partnership to translate research into impact. UACI at Biosphere 2 offers interconnected spaces intentionally designed and constructed to accommodate different types of users as well as bring together resources needed to advance technology. A proposed expansion includes developing a tech park that would allow corporations to collaborate directly with the research and innovation occurring at Biosphere 2.
As a Research 1 institution, The University of Arizona is a leader in research in renewable energy, sustainability, water resource management, space and defense, mining technology, biotech, and optical sciences. “Academic research and innovation may begin in a lab setting, but, through units like UACI, we ensure that our work reaches far beyond the university, enriching life for all,” says Elizabeth “Betsy” Cantwell, UArizona’s senior vice president of research and innovation. “UACI has done an incredible job helping startups from the university and tech community realize their commercial market potential. Uniting these organizations will allow us to accelerate the translation of research to real-world impact.” Joaquin Ruiz, UArizona vice president of global environmental futures and director of Biosphere 2, says, “Together, we will advance companies who focus on improving impacts on the environment, food safety and security, fit-for-purpose water, water access and energy security.” Jessa Turner is communications director of Tech Parks Arizona.
TechConnect | SUMMER 2022 | 14
JOINING FORCES
BY GARY WERNER
SENSING DANGER Research seeks to empower utilities for more targeted wildfire response Wildfires are becoming more widespread and destructive. The total area they burn in the United States has expanded by an average of almost 200,000 acres each year for the past three decades.
Financially, eight of the 10 most devastating conflagrations in American history happened during just the last five years.
TechConnect | SUMMER 2022 | 15
Meanwhile, the global incidence of extreme blazes is projected to increase by 50% before the end of the century, according to a recent report from the United Nations. The agency therefore calls for a radical shift in societal orientation away from reaction and response toward greater prevention and preparedness, including more investment in technical monitoring systems. Anamitra Pal, an assistant professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, is leading new research to develop and deploy such a monitoring system for electric power infrastructure. Power lines and other grid equipment stretch through remote wilderness that is susceptible to wildfires, and relative isolation poses a significant hurdle to understanding and managing risks. “The relationship between wildfires and the power grid is complex,” Pal says. “Where exactly is a fire relative to power lines in some distant area? How much of a particular line’s capacity is reduced due to that fire? What’s the best time to take a line out of service? Right now, there are fundamental gaps in the sensing capabilities and in the decision-making methods needed to answer these questions.”
Wildfire Awareness and Risk Management system deploys wireless sensors to monitor the environment around power transmission equipment in remote locations, and that data can guide more accurate grid operations decisions during periods of high wildfire risk.
Pal and his colleagues are seeking to close those gaps through development of a Wildfire Awareness and Risk Management (WARM) system. It will configure Internet of Things wireless sensors to monitor the environment around power transmission equipment in isolated settings and apply the data to facilitate resilient grid operation during periods of high wildfire risk. Their effort is supported by a $1.5 million award from the Addressing Systems Challenges through Engineering Teams (ASCENT) program at the National Science Foundation. ASCENT encourages collaborations among research communities devoted to devices, circuits, algorithms, systems and networks. It seeks bold, unconventional proposals expected to yield disruptive technologies that address the most pressing societal challenges. The WARM project team intends to raise real-time situational awareness and develop methods and strategies for more successful fire prevention and rapid response to fires by utility operators, municipal managers and state regulators. It plans to offer these benefits through advances in remote sensing, wireless communication, power system security analysis and optimization. “Our work comprises two interrelated research thrusts,” Pal says. “The first one focuses on developing sensor installations that can operate almost perpetually in distant areas. These ‘fit and forget’ nodes or suites of sensors need to be self-sustaining.” Designing these sensor suites is the work of co-principal investigators Jennifer Blain Christen, an associate professor of electrical engineering in the Fulton Schools, and Umit Ogras, an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ogras says. “Our idea is to implement an innovative, hierarchical sensor system. It will divide the various sensors of each unit into several levels according to their power consumption.” Pal says the team will leverage prior environmental sensing research that Ogras conducted as an assistant professor at the Fulton Schools, when he won a Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “This hierarchy of sensing systems will be housed inside a closed box for protection against the environment,” Pal says. “These sensor suites will also need a reliable communication system because we’re talking about isolated installations. We need to consider where we place them and how often they should communicate with the central system. These are some of the issues we’re exploring in the first thrust of the project.” The focus of the second thrust is the power grid itself. Which specific types of information do these sensor suites need to provide in order to aid more reliable and resilient grid operations? And once provided, how can that information facilitate better decision-making? Pal will be working with co-principal investigator Line Roald, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to look at both preventive and corrective decision-making. The corrective aspect of WARM’s second research thrust seeks to inform decision-making related to wildfires sparked by sources other than the electric grid, such as a lightning strike or
a campfire that got out of control. How can data be applied to take grid-related action in a way that considers broader implications? “Decisions need to account for different operating states. For example, the middle of a hot summer day is when people really need their air conditioners running. At that point in time, it might be best to keep the lines in service for as long as possible,” Pal says. “On the other hand, demand is lower at night because temperatures drop and most people are asleep. So, deenergizing some lines then may not cause a big problem. The key focus of our second thrust is to operate the power system across a spectrum of these situations.” The last element of WARM’s work relates to policymaking, and it will be led by Elisabeth Graffy, a senior advisor for the Energy and Environment Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Graffy will focus on guiding future-focused decisions with the goal of enabling more targeted interventions. Examples include pre-emptively undergrounding power lines in areas of recurring high risk. While the WARM project focuses on understanding, anticipating, measuring and mitigating wildfire risks associated with the electric grid, the sensor suites and risk management approaches developed could one day extend to guiding better strategies and tactics for addressing many contingencies. In cases of flooding, hurricanes and other disruptive events, the best decisions always demand the right data. Gary Werner is a science writer for the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.
TechConnect | SUMMER 2022 | 16
“Making these devices self-sustaining means harvesting energy from solar cells or coupling from power lines. But those capacities are not very generous, so we still need to be conservative with energy consumption,”
BY STEVE YOZWIAK
A THIN LINE
Professor Johanna DiStefano
Even normal weight is no guarantee against severe fatty liver disease Severe fatty liver disease is commonly associated with obesity, but according to a review of scientific literature conducted by researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that even normal weight individuals can contract this potentially life-threatening condition. Why this occurs is poorly understood, though some of the suspected liver-disease risk-factors for lean individuals include diet, genetics, ethnicity and even menopausal status for women, according to the scientific review published recently in the journal Diabetology and Metabolic Syndrome.
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“Because fatty liver disease, in most cases, is a clinically silent condition, the absence of early signs and symptoms coupled with normal laboratory and body measurements blind clinicians to the presence of severe liver disease in normal weight individuals,” says Johanna DiStefano, professor in TGen’s Metabolic and Fibrotic Disease Program, and head of the Diabetes and Fibrotic Disease Unit. Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common chronic liver condition in the U.S. and may affect an estimated 24% of the global population. The incidence of NAFLD is climbing worldwide, making it a significant health threat. Its most severe form can progress to a condition called nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which is characterized by liver inflammation and oftentimes fibrosis, and can lead to cirrhosis, cancer of the liver and death. All are difficult to diagnose and treat.
Surprise finding for lean patients One study showed lean individuals with NAFLD between the time they were initially diagnosed and follow-up examinations
were at greater risk for developing severe liver disease than those with higher body mass index (BMI). “This unexpected finding suggests that lean individuals experience a faster rate of fibrosis progression compared to those with higher BMI,” DiStefano says. While obesity is the strongest independent risk factor for NAFLD, even in cases of severe obesity some individuals do not develop severe liver disease. This suggests genetic factors may be at work, with some genes promoting liver disease while others protect against the condition. For example, one study of more than 900 lean Japanese participants showed a doubling of NAFLD risk among those who carried the well-studied PNPLA3 gene, which provides instructions for making a protein found in fat and liver cells. Also, women are at high risk of developing NAFLD following the menopausal transition, likely due to hormone-related metabolic changes resulting from the loss of protective estrogens and other factors, the review says. A major question is whether NAFLD in lean individuals represents a distinct disease requiring specific management, as suggested by many researchers, or is it a type of classical obesity-associated NAFLD that will respond to the current approach of weight loss, and the control of insulin resistance, high blood pressure and excessive fat in blood? “Early detection combined with the appropriate steps to mitigate NAFLD through lifestyle modifications and clinical interventions may effectively prevent the progression to NASH in lean individuals,” says DiStefano, adding that inclusion of lean individuals in NAFLD-related clinical trials is critical to reducing NAFLD in this patient group. Steve Yozwiak is the senior science writer for TGen. Get Connected: www.tgen.org
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2022 CEO Leadership & Golf Retreat WORKSHOPS | KEYNOTES | GOLF | NETWORKING
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