Environmental Engineering & Water Resources

The Environmental Engineering & Water Resources Group is comprised of eleven researchers looking from the rock to the river to the sky.

Research Areas

Air Quality and Climate Change

• Air quality modeling
• Climate Change modeling
• Global climate patterns assessment

Environmental Monitoring and Assessment

• Water quality
• Ecohydrology/Ecohydraulics
• Stream habitat quality

Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology

• Experimental and applied microbial ecology
• Control of C- and N- fluxes
• Genomic-scale to ecological-scale stochastic processes

Water and Wastewater Treatment

• Water treatment and quality
• Waste and wastewater treatment

Environmental Restoration of Impaired Ecosystems

• Groundwater restoration, bioremediation
• Stream rehabilitation

Hydrology

• Paleohydrology and climate impacts
• Urban impacts / Stormwater management
• Groundwater modeling
• Stochastic systems analysis
• Streamflow Forecasting and relationships to climate impact

River Mechanics

• Sediment transport/hydraulics
• Fluvial geomorphology
• Stream restoration

Sustainable Energy Solutions

• Biofuels Production
• Water-Energy Nexus

Facilities

Water Resources/Hydraulics Lab

The water resources engineering group manages the hydraulics laboratory which is primarily used as a teaching facility. For teaching, it includes several open channel flumes, seepage and drainage bench tester, pipe friction and pump curve bench testers, and hydrostatics bench tester.

A research flume includes a recirculating flume for fluvial measurements of soil cohesive properties and resistance to stream bed shear. A Sontek acoustic Doppler velocimeter measures 3D velocity vectors.

Environmental Engineering Labs

The environmental engineering laboratories are equipped with state-of-the art instrumentation for research in applied microbiology, water quality analysis, organics characterization, and particle surface analysis. The laboratories are located in the Science and Engineering Research Facility (SERF) Building on campus. Some of our analytical instrumentation is shown below in the following photos. In addition to instrumentation, laboratory bench space is utilized for wet chemistry analysis and on-going experimentation. Located in Perkins Hall, the Environmental Engineering Program has separate laboratory space for our teaching facility.