With the growing demand for clean water around the world, there is an increasing interest in advanced membrane-based technology, and more performance efficient and cost-effective membranes are needed to purify increasingly contaminated and/or saline water. One way to help guide the design of advanced membranes is to establish the structure/property relationships between polymer chemistry and water and/or salt transport properties for these membranes. To achieve this, we modified the polymer structure to test their transport properties and performance. We will be using sulfonated polysulfones, prepared using a polycondensation chemical reaction. Sulfonated polysulfones are high-performance thermoplastics known for their toughness and stability that have an SO3 negatively-charged group. In this study, we hypothesized that adding a hydrophilic functional group (hydroquinone (HQ) and methoxy-hydroquinone (MHQ)) to the sulfonated polysulfone backbone will further distribute the water molecules throughout the polymer, thus suppressing salt transport properties. Water permeability and salt rejection were measured using a dead-end stainless-steel water flux cell, salt diffusivity was measured using the kinetic desorption method, and salt permeability was measured using the dual-chamber direct permeation cell. Our current results suggest: (1) the hydrophilicity of these materials increased significantly as sulfonation level increased; (2) the water permeability increased more than one order of magnitude as sulfonation level increased, while salt permeability increased by two orders of magnitude; (3) there is a water permeability to water/salt selectivity trade-off. Further experiments and result analysis of these HQ-based polysulfone materials is necessary to verify our research hypothesis.