EEB Professor Vincent Denef has been awarded a grant from the Strategic Initiative Fund to revolutionize the way we track pollution and other threats to freshwater habitats. He is part of a team including Associate Professor Nakhiah Goulbourne and David Blaauw, Kensall D. Wise Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, of the U-M College of Engineering, using interdisciplinary collaboration to better understand and protect lake ecosystems. This research brings together materials engineering, low-power wireless electronics, and microbial ecology to create untethered “living sensor” networks for environmental monitoring.


Southeast Michigan’s lakes are popular recreation areas and important sources of drinking water, as well as fisheries and aquatic habitats. The initial focus of the Living Electronics for Environmental Monitoring project is non-point-source nutrient pollution, which promotes harmful algal blooms. These blooms poison lake water, making it unusable for humans and harmful to other organisms. High resolution data is needed to detect and monitor nutrient pollution and ecosystem response, and Denef and his collaborators plan to use algae and cyanobacteria, combined with autonomous electronics, to transmit the real-time data needed to address threats to lakes. The centimeter-scale sensors will combine hydrogels containing photosynthetic microorganisms with electronics that can sense, compute, harvest energy, and transmit data wirelessly. 


“Some of the seeds for this project were sown years ago,” said Denef. “At a Bold Initiative gathering organized by the Office of the Vice President for Research, I met a state official from the department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, who is now at the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and who shared similar concerns as me regarding the challenge to tackle non-point source pollution. That conversation eventually led to an MDARD-funded project led by Dr. Jennifer Blesh, then at U-M School for the Environment and Sustainability, now at Michigan State University, which provided the environmental issue this SIF project is centered on. Professors Goulbourne and Blaauw had been developing the living electronics concept and a fusion with our expertise in microbial ecology and the environmental issue became a great pitch to the SIF. 


“It’s exciting to bring together expertise across campus to leverage principles in microbial ecology, materials science, and electronic engineering to integrate complex environmental inputs into signals that can allow us to link individual farmer oriented policy incentives to their impacts on aquatic health, which ultimately will help both farmers and those relying on healthy freshwater resources.”


The team aims to produce prototypes of 3-D-bioprinted multi-algal structures and fluorescent sensor motes, drawing on Denef’s decades of experience in freshwater microbial communities. Goulbourne, director of the Soft Materials Research Laboratory, brings expertise in biological membranes and electro-active polymers. Blaauw, the Kensall D. Wise Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has created millimeter and smaller scale sensors for a variety of applications. They will field test the living electronics in the agricultural watershed of Lake Erie, creating a foundation for larger scale research. Together, they are pushing the boundaries of what is possible to know about how freshwater habitats function, and how they become disrupted.


The Living Electronics for Environmental Monitoring project contributes to the Energy, Climate Action, Sustainability and Environmental Equity impact area of the Strategic Initiative Fund. President Domenico Grasso announced the $1 billion, 10-year Strategic Initiative Fund in November 2025, seeking ideas with the potential to create lasting, transformational change across our campus community and society. The inaugural SIF open call received 450 proposals from across U-M’s three campuses and Michigan Medicine, and a total of $40 million was awarded to 37 projects in this first year. Congratulations to Denef for bringing this remarkable project to EEB!