With corporate-sponsored research, Chris Wirth builds win-win collaborations with industry partners
Have you ever thought about the science behind the consistency of your shampoo? Or the intricate differences between the paints on your car and your walls? What about the coatings on your phone or inside food packaging?
Chris Wirth has—a lot.
He's dedicated his research career to complex fluids engineering—the branch of science used to formulate nearly all consumer products found in everyday lives that are liquid-like and contain other types of materials, such as polymers or nanoparticles.
Wirth, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at ӰƵ, aims to better understand these materials—particularly how they flow and perform—to design new approaches. Through his work, he and his research group have collaborated with a number of industry partners, serving as subject matter experts that can give companies important insights into what's happening in their products.
"Oftentimes, what happens in corporate research is a customer will come to them with a problem, and they might not be capable of providing a full solution to that customer," Wirth said. "What we do is we team with the partner to provide unique expertise and experimental approaches that are not possible for the companies.”
Industry partnerships can improve academic research, while contributing to the broader economy. As federal priorities have shifted, research universities need to lean into more, use-inspired research to solve real world problems, while also continuing basic, hypothesis-driven research, explained Michael Oakes, senior vice president for research at ӰƵ.
“As research universities are being forced to evolve, the kind of work that Chris and others are doing is really important to our next steps,” Oakes said. "The goal of research, for me, is impact—solving fundamental, practical problems sponsors care about. ”
Solving problems with industry
Wirth's corporate-sponsored research has offered countless opportunities.
His team had a long-term project with PPG Industries studying automobile coatings. One area of that research, which eventually gained support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), sought to minimize defects during the energy-intensive drying process.
"Defects can arise during that drying process, and consumers have a very high expectation when it comes to automobile coating," Wirth said. "So in that particular example, we were trying to understand how to minimize defects (and) spend less time, less energy on the drying process to make that manufacturing process more sustainable."
His group has also partnered with Sherwin Williams to develop new imaging technology to track the drying process of paints. Last year, he took a year-long sabbatical to work as a visiting research scientist at the Dow Chemical Company.
More recently, his team has worked to develop formulation strategies for materials for energy applications. They’ve applied that to a newer collaboration focused on the formulation of catalytic inks for fuel cell and electrolyzers.
Wirth is planning to submit several proposals in the next year and a half, drawing from what he learned from these experiences.
He also brings lessons back to the classroom, using his time in industry to expand on students’ educational experiences. For instance, all of the PhD students in his group do internships with corporate partners. Because the majority of STEM PhD students don’t wish to pursue a career as a professor, industrial research training is a valuable part of their education.
"What I hope to show the students in my group—undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs—is that you really need the spectrum of research in order to solve the problem," Wirth said.
Win-win partnerships
Developing connections with industry can happen countless ways, but what's critical, Wirth said, is meeting companies where they're at and considering their needs alongside a PI's own expertise and goals.
A common mistake faculty researchers make when approaching corporate researchers is showing up thinking they have all the answers or immediately suggesting a topic of study, Wirth said. This fails to recognize that corporate research entities are highly developed, with lots of experts, their own needs and are primarily driven by customers.
What's been successful for Wirth has been to instead ask for a few specific technical problems that a corporate partner needs solved.
"I can then go back to my own research group, and decide if any of these are interesting for us to pursue, and whether or not we have the expertise for it," he said. "Through that iterative process, between myself and my corporate partner, I can be successful in creating a collaboration."
Wirth said he looks for problems that will be a win-win for the corporate partner and his research team. The process helps academic researchers, particularly trainees, learn about deadlines, agility and viable product success.
"I enjoy working with corporate scientists because they can clearly articulate the many ways that the fundamental physical phenomena I’ve described countless times in the lab or classroom are directly relevant to their products,” Wirth said. “They provide the ultimate context for why the work I do truly matters."
Though corporate-sponsored research may be smaller-scale projects, there are ways to build on that opportunity to go after larger investments or find other wins. For example, working on a problem may help him generate preliminary data for a future proposal, develop expertise in his lab or train a student.
“You have to really make sure that the problem that they have is going to be mutually beneficial,” he said.
In the case of PPG, they wanted Wirth's support studying a defect known as "sag," where you paint something and fluid runs down the wall. With funding support from PPG, Wirth’s group developed a relatively unique microscope that could track this process. They used the microscope to generate preliminary data that helped them secure a grant from the NSF.
“That's the perfect example, I think, of how those relationships can grow to bigger things," Wirth said.
