About Paul L. Busch

The WRF Endowment honors Paul L. Busch, Ph.D., with this award
because he so completely embodied the spirit of creativity, visionary
thinking, and practical application of scientific research — a
spirit that is essential to passing on a clean-water environment to
future generations. He led private and public development of water
quality technology for more than 40 years as an environmental engineer.
He believed passionately in the importance of education and devoted much
of his time to mentoring and promoting the next generation of
environmental engineers. But more than anything, Dr. Busch pursued
innovation in environmental management. He inspired those he worked with
to examine familiar issues from new perspectives and to take new
approaches to solving environmental issues. The purpose of engineering,
as he saw it, was not just to build a better tool, but to build a better
tool for the right reason.
One organization especially close to Dr. Busch's heart was the Water
Environment Research Foundation (WERF), now the Water Research Foundation (WRF). He served as chairman of its
Board of Directors in 1994 and 1995, and as emeritus chairman until his
death in 1999. Through the foundation, Dr. Busch found an organization that sought to
advance the state of water quality research and technology. He supported
and fostered its mission with the same vigor and passion with which
he had encouraged countless rising engineers and scientists. He helped
to build the foundation's subscriber base and to find government funding for its
programs.
Dr. Busch also used the foundation as a platform, as a "bully pulpit," to
spread his message — a call for the environmental engineering
community to move ahead and break new ground. He challenged engineers
and scientists to devise new technologies for addressing ongoing issues
of water quality, rather than relying on traditional solutions that owed
more to the past than the future. To Dr. Busch, the foundation "was created to
reinvigorate water quality research and to make research relevant to
practitioners, legislators, regulators, and the public, in order to
improve environmental decision making."
Dr. Paul L. Busch was a man of great integrity, of boundless
enthusiasm and vigor. He was a man who loved his work, embraced it as an
intellectual challenge, and saw in it the common good of building a
better environment for all mankind. To this man, and to his vision of
the future of water quality engineering, the WRF Endowment dedicates
this award.