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“We wanted to be able not only to address the development issues, but also provide some expertise from the United States through lessons learned and applicable U.S. technologies,” Gourlay recalls of the initiative.

He helped set up offices in Asia to work on the partnership, meanwhile linking American companies with more than $730 million in business. At the same time, he was helping the region address its environmental woes.

“I fell in love with Asia and fell in love with this concept of ‘doing well by doing good,’” Gourlay says.

Later, while working at Johns Hopkins University’s nonprofit public-health organization Jhpiego, Gourlay had a light-bulb moment about what was missing in the link between U.S. efforts to zero in on health and overarching environmental issues, especially when it came to the health effects of pollution and climate change.

“I just realized how very silo-ed the public-health world was from the environmental world,” he says.

Troubled by this lack of connectedness and possessed of an entrepreneurial spirit, Gourlay founded the Maryland-Asia Environmental Partnership (MD-AEP) three years ago. That group now has a network of more than 500 stakeholders that addresses developmental, public-health, and environmental concerns.

“Our rolodex really covers the gamut in terms of climate change, food safety, water, energy, you name it, in terms of experts we can deliver to Asia,” Gourlay says. “There has been a lot of heavy lifting that’s been going on.”

Maryland-based members of the MD-AEP say the partnership is an outlet for scientific creativity that might not otherwise find funding.

“What happens when we all get together is sort of amazing. It’s galvanizing the purpose of what we do,” says engineer Tom Sprehe of the Maryland office of KCI Technologies.

He calls Gourlay’s brainchild “a cool model for ‘Let’s take the Chesapeake Bay as probably one of the most important environmental canvases to paint on.’”

The partnership brings together private businesses and such academic and governmental powerhouses as the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Johns Hopkins, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Maryland Department of Environment, and the Maryland Environmental Service.

“It’s beyond regulatory agencies. It’s beyond just academia and scientists with beards,” Sprehe says of the partnership. “It’s got all of us cranking along and working together.”

Ann Swanson, executive director of the tri-state Chesapeake Bay Commission, says the MD-AEP serves as an important vehicle for bringing innovative clean-water ideas to light, especially in a challenging economy.

“Right now is not a great time for businesses to make risky investments,” Swanson says, but the partnership can help “connect the dots” between science and business.

“At the end of the day, it’s about combining facts and passion and technology,” she says, something Gourlay’s partnership does well.

“It’s about convincing people to do things.”

When MD-AEP members travel to Singapore for the July 4-8 International Water Week, Gourlay says he expects to finalize an agreement with the Singapore Public Utilities Board to work together to complement that country’s urban water-management export model.

The agreement will also tap into the partnership’s water-leaders network, whose members include the likes of Professor Rita Colwell of the University of Maryland College Park and Johns Hopkins. Colwell was honored with the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize for her work on controlling the spread of cholera and other waterborne diseases.

Vance Hum, president and CEO of the Rockville-based I.M. Systems Group and a partnership member, says Maryland stakeholders can offer much to Singapore, and that that country, which follows the idea of “recovering every drop,” can, in turn, offer lessons to the United States.

“There is much that we can learn from the Singapore model,” Hum says. “We need to have a proactive approach to managing our water resources, and we need to insert discipline in our use of water.

“Do we really have to use potable water to water our plants and wash our cars? If we do not take steps to ‘recover every drop,’ we will be faced with even more serious water-scarcity issues in the future.”

Also on the MD-AEP’s horizon: Gourlay’s role as a member of the steering committee for the upcoming Environmental Management for Enclosed Coastal Seas meeting, or EMECS 9, in Baltimore this August. The biannual meeting, first held in 1990 in Kobe, Japan, allows scientific and government officials to share best practices.

“With all of the attention placed on the Chesapeake Bay at the event, we can move the agenda forward in terms of what’s been going on in our region,” Gourlay says of the EMECS 9.

“I think there’s a great opportunity in that regard.”