UCI UWRC Affiliated Faculty

Dean B. Baker - Professor of Clinical Medicine, Director of the Center for Occupational and Evnironmental Health (COEH) and Chief, Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in the School of Medicine. As an epidemiologist, Baker is interested in various aspects of water and public health. Baker's research includes environmental epidemiology; toxicology; children's health; developmental toxicity; pesticides; hazardous waste; environment; biological markers.

Alan Barbour - Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Barbour's research involves waterborne diseases and public health, with potential implications in bioterrorism. He also is interested in the development of novel methods for control of vector-borne infections and vectors.

Tareg Bey - Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine, Director of International Emergency Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Bey focuses on nuclear, biological and chemical threats, international emergency medicine, structure and designs of emergency care delivery and disaster preparedness. His research interests include nuclear, biological and chemical threats to the public and public health and disaster preparedness, all which could threaten public utilities like water supply.

Bruce Blumberg - Associate Professor of Developmental and Cell Biology, Blumberg focuses on the biology of nuclear hormone receptors in development, adult physiology and how both are disrupted by hormonally active compounds in the diet and environment. He is developing new methods for the detection of endocrine disrupting compounds in water and for evaluating treatment of these compounds in water intended for reuse.

Marlon Boarnet - Professor of Planning Policy, and Design, and a Faculty Associate of the Institute of Transportation Studies, Boarnet concentrates on infra-structure development policy, applying his economic and policy knowledge of highways to the water field.

Peter Bowler - Lecturer, Assoc. Researcher, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; and Director of the UCI Arboretum, Bowler's research covers open space conservation and management of wildlife; mitigation and habitat restoration as it relates to biodiversity loss, particularly in coastal sage scrub and wetlands; rare, threatened and endangered species; the chemical ecology of lichens; and environmental ethics.

Timothy Bradley - Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Bradley focuses on the physiological ecology of saline-water insects and the physiology of energy metabolism in Drosophila.

William Bretz - Manager of Reserves, Natural Reserve System of the University of California, which includes the San Joaquin Freshwater Marsh at UC Irvine. He is also affiliated with the School of Biological Sciences.

William J. Cooper - Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Urban Water Research Center. Cooper's research includes sunlight-induced aquatic photochemistry; radiation chemistry relating to toxic and hazardous water remediation and water treatment; and the development of ozone treatment for the control of invasive species in the ballast water of ships.

Dan M. Cooper - Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Pediatrics, Director of the General Clinical Research Center, and Chief of the Pediatric Pulmonary Division, Cooper's pediatric pulmonology research focuses on health effects of exercise in children. He is involved with a large NIH study examining adolescent obesity where it appears that a possible major factor is the lack of water in schools.

Nancy A. Da Silva - Professor, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Da Silva is interested in molecular biotechnology. Her research involves host/vector design; optimization of fermentation strategies; mathematical modeling; and the microbial degradation of toxic substances, with special emphasis in the area of treatment of arsenic in aqueous solutions.

Marjorie DeMartino - Director of the Calif. State Summer School for Mathematics & Science (COSMOS), DeMartino is interested in developing summer units for high school students to study the various aspects of water within the hydrologic cycle.

Philip Dennison - Director of the Chemistry NMR Facility (two locations) featuring five high-resolution instruments including a 600 MHz spectrometer; two 500 MHx spectrometers, one of which is equipped with a highly sensitive cryoprobe; and a solids NMR instrument. Dennison is interested in assisting in the structural elucidation of compounds involved in the destruction of toxic wastes and other environmental contaminants.

Joseph DiMento - Professor in Planning, Policy, and Design and in Criminology, Law & Society, and Director of the Newkirk Center for Science and Society. He is interested in urban planning, water law and institutions that manage water resources. His focus is on both domestic and international water problems, and he has done work specifically on NAFTA Countries, Israel and the Black Sea.

Ellen Druffel - Professor of Earth System Science, Druffel's research covers coupling between climate, ocean ventilation and CO2 cycling; tracking the influence of climate change on present and past upper ocean circulation using isotope studies of annually-banded corals; high-precision radiocarbon, d13C and d18O analyses are used to determine decade time scale changes in the ventilation rate of upper waters in major oceanic current systems during the past few centuries; and determination of the sources and turnover times of organic matter in ocean water.

James Famiglietti - Professor of Earth System Science, Famiglietti researches the role of hydrology in the coupled Earth system, including current atmosphere interaction, satellite remote sensing of soil moisture and terrestrial water storage, soil moisture variability and scaling, and global change impacts on water resources and hydrology-vegetation interaction.

David Feldman - Professor and Chair of Planning, Policy, and Design, Feldman specializes in water resources management and policy, global climate change policy, ethics and environmental decisions, adaptive management and sustainable development. His current research is focused on the sources of value conflicts over allocation and distribution of water, and the difficulties in achieving institutional reform to promote equity in water management in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Jean Fried - Visiting Scholar/Adjunct Faculty, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Liaison with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He manages the UNESCO-IHP ISARM project on transboundary groundwater education and training.

Amihai Glazer - Professor of Economics, Glazer's research focuses on political economy. He teaches a course in environmental economics and within this context gets involved in water-related issues.

Michael Goulden - Associate Professor, Earth System Science, School of Physical Sciences, is an ecosystem ecologist who focuses on the carbon, water, and nutrient cycles of terrestrial and wetland ecosystems. His research includes a series of long-term measurements in the San Joaquin Marsh Reserve, a large freshwater marsh on UCI’s campus.

Stanley Grant - Professor of Environmental Engineering and Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science , Grant studies the sources, fate, and transport of pathogens and indicator organisms in drinking water, urban runoff, and the coastal ocean.

John Greaves - Director of the Mass Spectrometry Facility, Greaves is involved in evaluating the destruction mechanisms of organic compounds of interest in water chemistry as well as in wastewater treatment.

Felix Grun - Lecturer and researcher in Development and Cell Biology, Grun is examining new and innovative methods for identifying and measuring low concentrations of endocrine disrupting compounds using high throughput cell reporter systems and in vitro receptor binding assays.

John Hemminger - Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the School of Physical Sciences, Hemminger is interested in reactions that occur on a wide variety of both simple and complex surfaces. Research conducted in this area is being extended to aqueous environments and will have implications in facilitated transport in groundwater systems.

Kuo-Lin Hsu - Assistant Adjunct Professor, Hsu works in the area of remote sensing of precipitation and hydrologic system modeling. He is specifically interested in the development of artificial intelligence and remote sensing techniques in the classification and decision making of hydrologic systems.

Bradley Hughes - Lecturer and Researcher in Department of Education on Science Education, Brad also conducts water quality research on experimental microbial evolution to environments of the coastal ecosystem in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. At the Aquarium of the Pacific he directs Professional Development, Science Education Research, and Science Media.

Bisher Imam - Associate Adjunct Professor, Imam is interested in the application of satellite data, GIS, and information technologies in hydrology and water resources. Current research activities focus on the utilization of remote sensing data to study the impacts of climate variability on water resource availability and hydrologic responses of both urban and natural watersheds.

Helen Ingram - Professor Emerita in Planning, Policy, and Design, is interested in the use of science in policy making in regard to urban water. Specific topics include international and transboundary water management, equity issues, water supply, population growth, water pricing, and demand management.

Sunny Jiang - Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Associate Professor for Community & Environmental Medicine, and Social Ecology, Jiang studies the health implications of coastal water quality from urban runoff. She studies toxicity and microbial quality of treated and untreated wastewater, storm runoff and urban runoff.

Kristi Koenig - Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine, Director of Public Health Preparedness, Co-Director, EMS and Disaster Medical Sciences Fellowship, Dept. of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Koenig focuses on disaster medicine, public health preparedness, homeland security, emergency management and health policy. Her research includes the development of models of surge capacity and triage systems for mass casualty allocation of scarce resources including the management of disasters that may result in disruption of water systems.

Abraham Lee - Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Lee's research interest focuses on the development of integrated micro and nano fluidic chip processors for the manipulation and self-assempbly of biomolecules and other synthesized nanoparticles. He is also interested in the development of microfuidics which might find uses in water treatemnt and distriubted sensor networks.

Raul Lejano - Associate Professor in Planning, Policy & Design, his research revolves around new institutional designs for resource management. Current research focuses on new models for explaining collective action around water supply and related issues, especially at the community level. Another current area of interest is the incorporation of climate change and other scenario-type information in local hazard planning (e.g., floods and droughts).

Cristina Lopes - Associate Professor of Informatics in the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, Director of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction. Lopes’ research is centered in software science, with ramifications into Web 2.0 technologies, virtual worlds, and computing systems embedded in the physical world. Lopes is interested in all aspects of developing and applying modern internet-based software systems to scientific and engineering endeavors.

Lisa Grant Ludwig - Associate Professor, Program in Public Health, College of Health Sciences, Social Ecology, and Assoc. Director, Calif. Hazards Institute at the University of California. Grant Ludwig is interested in potential disruption of water systems due to seismic activity and in the stratigraphy and structure of quaternary aquifers in the Los Angeles and Orange County region.

Susan Marshall - Director of Undergraduate Programs in the Dept. of Education, and UCI Calif. Teach Project Science and Math Initiative Project/Staff Director, Marchall is interested in technical content relating to water for students in the focus program of the Teach project.

Adam Martiny - Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Earth System Science, Martiny works in the areas of microbial ecology, genomics, and physiology. His research aims to understand how bacteria evolve and adapt to changes in the environment. This can either be spatial differences in the oceans (i.e. how does bacteria evolve to compete in nitrogen vs. phosphate limited areas of the ocean?) or temporal where they may evolve as a result of global climate change.

Jennifer Martiny - Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, interested in the relationship between bio-diversity, ecosystem functioning, and human well-being. A goal of her research is to understand how microbial diversity affects ecosystem functioning, particularly in coastal salt marshes and marine systems.

Richard A. Matthew - Associate Professor in Planning, Policy, and Design, and Political Science, Director of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs which incorporates the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Project, Matthew is interested in the international and global aspects of urban water, and specializes in environmental change; conflict and security; sustainable development; environmental justice and policy; and global governance.

William Maurer - Chair and Professor of Anthropology, Maurer's research includes everyday beliefs and practices surrounding law and economy, particularly with respect to the impact of social contract doctrine and the relations of property. Research interests include multilateral governance, soft law and other novel political and legal arrangements as they impact global processes, including resource management.

Michael McNally - Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, of Social Ecology, Director, Graduate Program in Transportation Science, and a Faculty Associate of the Institute of Transportation Studies, McNally's research interests focus on the interrelationships between transportation and land use and the resultant travel behavior, the analysis and development of innovative modeling techniques, and the environmental impacts of transportation systems.

Susan McNulty - Lecturer in Neurobiology and Behavior.

Sharad Mehrotra - Professor of Computer Science-Systems, is interested in distributed network systems in both water utilities and water distribution systems, as well as data management and distributed systems-data mining, OLAP, event-oriented systems, multimedia systems, spatio-temporal analysis, uncertainty, privacy, service-oriented architectures, sensors, mobility, and localization.

David S. Meyer - Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Planning, Policy, and Design, Meyer's areas of interest include social movements, political sociology, and public policy. He is most directly concerned with the relationships between social movements and the political contexts in which they emerge.

Frank Meyskens - Vice Chancellor, College of Health Sciences, and Director of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, Meyskens is interested in the interaction of reactive oxygen species and cells at the interface of biology and cancer, particularly of human melanocytes and melanomas. His interest in water resides in the new areas relating to the determination of low concentrations of reactive oxygen species.

Ann Miller - Director of the California Science Project located at UCI's Center for Educational Partnerships, Miller is involved with local science teachers and serves as one of UCI's liaisons between water researchers and secondary educators. Miller is also involved in Faculty Outreach Collaborations Uniting Scientists, Students and Schools (FOCUS).

George E. Miller - Senior Lecturer, Supervisor of the Nuclear Reactor Facility, and Director of the Science Education Programs, Miller's research interest in chemical education includes environmental subjects and water, concepts that integrate well in to K-12 science education.

Ali Mohraz - Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. His research concentrates on soft polymeric and colloidal matter. The transport and fate of colloidal matter is of interest in both surface and ground water research areas.

Ayman Mosallam - Professor in Residence in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mosallam's research covers topics related to structural and earthquake engineering with a specialization in advanced composites and hybrid systems for infrastructure applications. Infrastructure development in the water sector is of utmost concern nationally. Mosallam is exploring new composities for use in water distribution and collection systems.

Daniel Mumm - Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Mumm's expertise lies in the area of advanced materials and structures. His he has overall responsibility for the Carl Zeiss Center of Excellence at UCI and is working with several faculty in the environmental applications of scanning electron microscopy.

Sergey Nizkorodov - Assistant Professor of Chemistry, studies interaction between solar radiation and atmospheric particulate matter, with special emphasis on photochemical reactions affecting composition and hygroscopicity of organic aerosol particles.

Oladele Ogunseitan - Professor of Social Ecology, of the Program in Public Health, and Director of the Program in Industrial Ecology, Ogunseitan is interested in the ecological fate and potential health effects of urban chemical pollutants, including pharmaceuticals, pesticides, toxic metals, and petrochemical compounds in wastewater, storm run-off, and drinking water sources. He is also working on the design of broad-spectrum ecological/human health biomarkers (sensors) of pollutants in water supply.

Betty H. Olson - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering in The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, studies urban water including microbial treatment systems, biomarkers to identify waste sources in water bodies, as well as microbes of public health significance.

Claudia Pasquero - Assistant Professor, Pasquero is a physical oceanographer interested in climate dynamics. Her research aims at identifying and quantifying the role that spatially or temporally well localized processes (such as tropical cyclones, turbulent eddies, convection, phytoplankton blooms) have on the global scale, and on heat storage and transport in particular.

Diane E. Pataki - Pataki is an ecologist focused on the role of plants and soils in the climate system, and the influence of land use change and urbanization on land-atmosphere interactions. Current projects include studies of the water use of urban vegetation and its influence on urban climate, as well as the effects of groundwater pumping and water imports to cities on natural ecosystems. Her lab also utilizes isotopic tracers to identify plant water sources, atmospheric water vapor sources, and the origins of urban pollutants.

William Reeburgh - Professor, Earth System Science, Reeburgh's research covers methane; geochemistry; atmospheric chemistry; chemical oceanography; coastal oceanography; wetlands; and stable isotopes. He studies global cycles of biogeochemically important elements, information and figures; the role and importance of anaerobic proceses and anoxic environments in the global carbon cycle; the role of microbial processes as controls and feedbacks in global climate change.

Amelia Regan - Associate Professor of Computer Science-Computing, and of Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Faculty Associate of the Institute of Transportation Studies, Regan is interested in applications of optimization techniques and information systems in freight transportation systems, which involves trucking, rail, maritime, air cargo, logistics, and supply chain modeling, as well as, the transportation of hazardous materials and possible contamination of suface water due to accidents.

Stephen Ritchie - Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, Ritchie studies transportation systems engineering concentrating on advanced traffic management and control systems. He is primarily focused on the development and application of new information technologies to support more efficient transportation systems. His interest is where IT issues and water may intersect.

Diego Rosso - Assistant Professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering, Rosso investigates water pollution, wastewater treatment, and their implications on global warming. His current research is centered on the water energy nexus, particularly studying water and wastewater treatment processes carbon-and energy-footprints.

Eric Saltzman - Professor of Earth System Science, Saltzman researches atmospheric chemistry, biogeochemistry, and air/sea exchange.

Scott Samuelsen - Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center, Samuelsen investigates the conflict between energy and the environment. One of the major issues that faces the water industry is related to energy. To help resolve this conflict, Samuelsen is looking at treatment processes for reducing energy requirements, and innovative energy sources such as fuel cells and renewable sources of methane from anaerobic digestion and waste waters.

Brett Sanders - Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Sanders is conducting research on water quality and quantity problems found in urban coastal waterways. Specific topics include flood mitigation in urbanized watersheds and the pollutant flushing properties of urban estuaries.

Jean-Daniel Saphores - Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, of Economics, of Planning, Policy & Design,and Faculty Associate of the Institute of Transportation Studies, Saphores is interested in economic tools for managing the demand of scarce water supplies, the management and financing of urban water, and the comparison of institutional arrangements for providing urban water services.

Walter Scacchi - Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Software Research in Information and Computer Science, and Associate Director of the Computer Game Culture and Technology Laboratory, looks to the UWRC to provide technical content for computer games to be developed to teach water in the hydrologic cycle to young learners via informal science education.

Jan Scherfig - Research Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Associate Director of the Urban Water Research Center, he is interested in water reclamation and reuse in the urban environment as well as the movement of contaminants of concern from sub-surface discharges.

Therese Shanahan - Co-Director of the California Science Project and FOCUS, Shanahan has a background in chemistry. She is involved with high school students and teachers in the development of technical content for water modules that will be used in secondary education in California.

Ronald Shank - is Professor and Chair of Community and Environmental Medicine in the School of Medicine, and Director of the Graduate Program in Environmental Toxicology. His research focuses on biochemical toxicology with a special interest in biological weapons threats.

Masanobu Shinozuka - Distinguished Professor and Chair of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Shinozuka's research encompasses lifeline earthquake engineering, structural reliability, and the socio-economic impact of major earthquakes. His interests include sensor distributed sensor networks in water distribution and wastewater collection systems and the rehabilitation of aging infrastructure and the potential effects of episodic events on water and wastewater systems.

Tony Soeller - Research Computing Specialist in Network and Academic Computing Services, and Lecturer in Earth System Science. Soeller, a geologist and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) expert, helps UCI researchers adapt the software to their research projects. GIS will be used in the future to detail both water distribution and wastewater collection systems and allow individuals to work real time with distributed sensor networks in water and wastewater systems.

Soroosh Sorooshian - Distinguished Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Sorooshian's research includes surface hydrology; hydroclimate modeling; application of remote sensing in hydrology; rainfall-runoff modeling; flood forecasting and control; water resources systems analysis and management.

John Southon - Director of the 14C laboratory in the Department of Earth Systems Science, Southern and is actively engaged in research using 14C as a tracer in various media.

Sharon Stern - Senior Lecturer AOE in the Program in Public Health, College of Health Sciences, Stern is interested in water pollution and treatment, environmental pollution remediation, health and policy.

Susan E. Trumbore - Professor, Earth System Science, and Acting Director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Trumbore's research focuses on accelerator mass spectrometry measurements of cosmogenic isotopes (primarily 14C and 10Be) in applications to earth system science. Particular projects have focused on using 14C to study the potential effects of land use and climatic change on the accumulation and turnover of organic matter in soils; the sources, transformations and ultimate fate of dissolved organic carbon in fresh and salt waters; the origin and accumulation rates of particulate organic matter in coastal environments.

Wytze E. van der Veer - Director, Laser Spectroscopy Facility in the School of Physical Sciences, van der Veer is interested in the time resolved spectral character of all dissolved organic matter in water and the application of time resolved laser, flash photolysis, techniques for determining reaction rate constants fluorescence lifetimes and chemical-light interactions in treatment processes.

Kerry Vandell - Professor of Finance and Director of the newly-created Center for Real Estate at the UCI Paul Merage School of Business, Vandell has researched and consulted extensively in the areas of real estate investment, urban/real estate/environmental economics, mortgage finance, and valuation theory.

Benjamin Villac - Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Villac's research focuses on space exploitation and exploration with emphasis on related nonlinear dynamical systems modeling and control. Space travel and exploration will require innovative approaches for water supply and wastewater treatment.

Kumar Wickramasinghe - Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and The Henry Samueli Endowed Chair. A pioneer in nanotechnology, Wickramasinghe holds 70 patents. His interests in water involve the characterization, fate, and transport of nanoparticles and the possible synthesis of nanoparticles for treating water, wastewater and wastewater systems

Albert Yee - Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Yee's research focuses on the physical and mechanical properties of polymers and soft materials, particularly in how they impact nanotechnology.

Jin-Yi Yu - Associate Professor, Earth System Science, is a climate physicist who studies climate variability in the atmosphere and oceans and their global and regional impacts. His research covers climate system modeling; El Nino and impacts; decadal climate shifts; storm track dynamics; Asian and North American monsoon rainfalls.

Charles S. Zender - Associate Professor of Earth System Science, Zender is an atmospheric physicist whose research includes aerosol-climate interactions arising from mineral dust, natural and anthropogenic soot, and volcanic emissions. His reseach group focuses on how surface-atmosphere exchanges cause and respond to wind erosion, surface hydrology, snowpack evolution, chemical and radiative forcing, and disease transmission.

Jian-Guo Zheng - Director of the Materials Characterization and Nanofabrication Facility located in the University of California Irvine Division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-(IT)2). Zheng is the Director of the Carl Zeiss Center of Excellence and is involved in applications of scanning electron microscopy to nanoparticles in water and other applications of scanning electron microscopy in water.