Four Drexel University professors will receive $190,000 to fund their projects for the Delaware River Watershed Initiative, which aims to protect and restore the Delaware River Basin’s water quality and overall ecological health, writes Dan Norton of the Philadelphia Business Journal.

The grants are financed by the William Penn Foundation and administered through Drexel’s Academy of Natural Science. The projects are being managed under the newly formed Drexel Watershed Consortium.

The state of Pennsylvania recently received D grades in its drinking water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Many regional municipalities have combined sewage systems for clean storm water and dirty wastewater. Together, they can overwhelm treatment plants, pushing the overflow into rivers or up to the manhole level, thus increasing risk of floods that damage property and other infrastructures.

Drexel’s Anneclaire DeRoos will receive $60,000 to conduct a study on the correlation between water use after heavy storms and gastrointestinal sickness due the contamination of water sources from wastewater overflow.

Eugenia Ellis will receive $30,000 to study whether some of Philadelphia’s 40,000 vacant lots could be used for stormwater management.

Mira Olson will receive $50,000 to use modeling techniques to predict changes to the Delaware Basin rivers.

Christopher Sales will receive $50,000 to create a “library” of microbe genomes to potentially track the source of microbial contamination in rivers and other bodies of water.

Click here to read more about the Drexel professors studying the Delaware River Basin.