NCERC Research Fellow Finds New Value in Illinois Corn

Before she came to the National Corn to Ethanol Research Center (NCERC), Brooke Wagner thought of corn mostly as food. As a senior research fellow there, she now spends her days finding other uses for it.

NCERC sits on the campus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). Wagner calls it “a bit of a hidden gem.” It has only about 15 full-time staff, but the center can take an idea from the lab to the fermentation suite to the pilot plant, all under one roof. Clients range from startups that need to validate a concept to large chemical companies scaling new technology up to 22,000 liters.

“Every day is very different,” Wagner said. Most of her time goes to contract research that moves bioproducts and technologies toward commercialization. She has also led independent research. During a contract corn-to-ethanol run, her team ran into problems handling very thick corn mash, so they spent the past year developing a method to solve them. They hope to publish the findings in a paper.

Wagner majored in molecular and cell biology and arrived at NCERC fresh out of college. She credits her position to the research fellowship program funded by IL Corn. “I would not be at NCERC without the research fellowship program,” she said.

The fellowship is one part of a longer partnership. IL Corn has supported NCERC since it opened in the early 2000s. It also helped fund the center’s recent expansion, which adds capacity to bring new corn-based products to market. Each of these investments has the same goal: creating new, long-term uses for Illinois corn.

Wagner said the biggest surprise of her fellowship has been how much value corn holds beyond the dinner plate, and how it can strengthen the supply chain behind everyday products.

She wants farmers to know that the work is tied directly to them, even when it doesn’t look like it. “It may seem very far removed from the farm with our pipettes and our test tubes,” she said, “but at the end of the day, the work we’re doing … really matters because of the Illinois farmers.”

At NCERC, she said, the questions are practical ones. Can we do this more efficiently? Can we create more value? Can we turn a waste product into something useful? And can we do it at a scale that makes sense?

“We’re trying to find other pathways to use the resource that you guys are creating,” Wagner said.