Thomas Sale, Emeritus Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been named the 2024 CSU STRATA Innovator of the Year. The award honors a faculty member whose work and intellectual property is at the center of commercial partnerships or has been developed into successful commercial products.
“The Innovator of the Year recognizes accomplishments in our field that greatly exceed the norm, vis-à-vis new technologies making a real-world impact,” said Richard Magid, Vice President of Technology Transfer at STRATA.
In his 26 years at CSU, Sale secured 13 patents and commercialized several products in environmental engineering and contaminant hydrology. He has also received approximately $20 million in research funding, mostly from such major industry partners as DuPont, Chevron, DOW, ExxonMobil, Suncor Energy, and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Sale appreciates the opportunities and support he has received over the years and underscores the work required to move technologies from theories to real-world use.
“Thomas Edison famously said ‘genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration’ and I believe that,” said Sale. “Anyone can have an idea but driving that idea to broad application requires a lot of patience and persistence.”
Valuable ties to industry
Sale spent more than a decade as an engineering consultant when he began working on a major site remediation project at a former railroad tie treatment plant in Laramie, Wyoming. At the project’s completion, after collaborating with international experts, Sale realized he wanted to know more and began his doctoral program in agricultural engineering at CSU.
His connections with industry partners remained mutually beneficial, from identifying critical problems to providing access to field sites for testing. One such connection has been with Colorado’s Suncor Energy.
“Suncor has funded and facilitated the development and testing of novel remediation technologies at their Commerce City refinery,” said Sale. “There are significant challenges in operating a full-scale refinery in a highly populated area like the Denver metro, yet we all heavily rely on fuel for the time being. Suncor staff have identified environmental challenges in their operation, which often became the driving factor behind the technologies we developed.”
Given his track record of finding solutions, many of Sale’s sponsors continuously supported CSU over nearly two decades and continue to support a new generation of researchers at CSU today.
As the founder of the Center for Contaminant Hydrology, Sale led the commercialization of real-time environmental monitoring, cryogenic core drilling, and petroleum biodegradation or composting. This encompasses intellectual property, new businesses, and patent and licensing revenue, further advancing CSU’s reputation.
“Rather than stopping at the publication of a paper, our group has scaled ideas beyond labs and models to field applications, which is a tedious process,” Sale said. “I know plenty of people smarter than me, but I don’t know many who are as stubborn or persistent as I am.”
Early introduction to engineering
Sale grew up near Chicago where he and his two brothers became apprentices and field crew for their civil engineer father. By age 14, Sale was driving a truck through construction sites, helping lay out new subdivisions.
“We watched our father come up with solutions, then we got to build them. Years later, we could stand in established subdivisions looking at emerging neighborhoods and know we were part of providing valued places for people to live.”
This early introduction to complex problems and building solutions may have shaped Sale’s outlook on innovation today.
“We strive to recognize that we don’t know what we don’t know and that some of the most exciting advancements occur when we find those things we didn’t know. The greatest joys of applied research often come when you step through the door of new understandings. As John Milton said, ‘So easy it seemed once found, which yet unfound most would have thought impossible.’”
Community of support
Sale considers the Innovator of the Year award a group achievement for the staff and students involved in the center over the years.
“Everyone wants to save the world, but you can’t save the world by yourself,” said Sale.
Sale also credits the culture and people at CSU as assets to innovation and entrepreneurship.
“CSU is at its best when it is part of the community and the economy. That’s what CSU STRATA does and they have been so helpful over the years,” said Sale. “CSU is fertile ground and so many people have helped me along the way: Department heads like Sandra Woods and Chuck Shackelford, deans, and research vice presidents. If you have a good idea and you ask for help at CSU, people will find ways to empower you to succeed.”
So, what’s next for Sale?
“We just hosted our third Subsurface Water Storage Symposium in Denver to explore storing water underground to prevent the loss of water from evaporation, which is a major issue in Colorado,” said Sale. “In a perfect world, CSU and all academic institutions in the state will have a role in driving this idea from concept to wide use.”
