The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001
1. The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program
The Stanford Environmental and Water Studies Program has a long and distinguished record of leadership in teaching, research, and service. Our objective is to develop solutions to paramount environmental problems and to sustain a world-class, preeminent program in education and research in the disciplines of environmental engineering and science, and environmental fluid mechanics and hydrology. We seek to train versatile students capable of working in diverse and ever-changing settings, and we accomplish this by developing tools, ideas, and knowledge that cut across disciplinary boundaries, providing solutions with general applicability for complex environmental problems.
The achievements of the Environmental and Water Studies Program at Stanford are built on a tradition of complementary investigations comprising laboratory studies, field work, and computational modeling. These three elements are and remain essential to the future of the program. In order to advance these elements, we adapt breakthroughs in the allied sciences, and seek collaborations at the interfaces between disciplines. Examples include the microbiology, biochemistry and molecular biology of environmental and biogeochemical processes; computer science and parallel computation for estuary flow management; applied mathematics and stochastic processes for atmospheric and hydrologic modeling; and physical and analytical chemistry for understanding contaminant fate and movement.
Protection of human health as well as ecosystems is much more challenging today than thirty-one years ago when the EPA was founded. The environmental problems we face today are diffuse rather than localized, subtle rather than obvious, and involve multiple environmental compartments rather than a single medium. Complex environmental questions have biology, chemistry, and transport as interrelated core components that transcend disciplinary boundaries and involve multiple temporal and spatial scales.
Hence, environmental policies must build on interconnected technical components; we have a strong record of contributing engineering understanding to policy decisions. Our structure and culture is one of shared intellectual challenges and cooperative, interdisciplinary projects with pooled expertise. In this document we present a forwardlooking, broadly cross-disciplinary program vision. At the core of our vision is an integrative, cross-scale approach, which has been adopted by study groups at the NSF and the NRC. Those studies stress new interdisciplinary environmental research directions focusing on human-environment interactions and greater understanding of biological, physical, and chemical phenomena below, on, and above the Earth's surface.
Our vision also captures the growing number and interests of Stanford students to understand the functioning of the biosphere and ecosystems, and the stresses human beings place on these systems. We believe the engineering perspective, with its quantitative approaches and model building, plays a central role in addressing these issues.
Along with human-environment interactions, there are challenging issues related to environmental resource protection, management, and conservation. In all likelihood, these issues will dominate our attention in the Twenty-first Century. We envision
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 positioning our education and research programs to tackle these problems by developing cross-disciplinary investigative tools that have wide applicability. At the core of our vision is the crucial need to develop an understanding of the linkages between small-scale processes and regional and long time-scale phenomena. For example, how do pore-scale microbiological, chemical, and hydrodynamic processes control and affect aquifer protection; how does droplet-scale aerosol dynamics control and affect regional air quality; how does small-scale turbulence over coral reefs control and affect the functioning of this ecosystem; how do small-scale sediment transport processes and river restoration efforts control and affect the performance of that ecosystem over decades; how are micro-scale chemical interactions, such as chemical availability, biological uptake, and system-level effects affected by contaminants in aquatic ecosystems; and, how do microbial pathogens and viruses persist in natural and engineered ecosystems?
Developments in remote sensing and internet-based technologies extend the interrelatedness of these scales and provide new ways to monitor environmental systems and to operate treatment processes.
To achieve this vision, and, to develop new opportunities for research and teaching, we will build on existing faculty strengths and interests, focusing on strengthening connections between the Environmental Engineering and Science Program and the
Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology Program, as well as improving bridges to other groups at Stanford outside the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.
Necessarily, we will need to sustain our traditional strengths as well as our commitment to using and developing the most forward-looking technologies in order to remain at the forefront of our discipline. The rest of this document discusses specific plans for achieving this vision of our future.
2.
What Is Needed to Achieve the Vision
In this section, we ask what would be the composition of an environmental and water studies program that is optimally designed to tackle the environmental challenges of the
21st century? As discussed in the previous section, the most vexing challenges will require development of policy or technology for problems involving multiple environmental compartments (air, water, soil/sediment, and biota), multiple temporal scales (fractions of a second to decades), and multiple spatial scales (molecular to global). A program designed optimally to address such problems should contain the expertise needed to collect environmental data, analyze and interpret data, perform meaningful experiments over a range of spatial scales, and simulate the chemical, biological, and physical processes operative within and between compartments, over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. This expertise should ideally be located within a single administrative unit with adjacent offices and shared laboratory facilities to maximize interactions and facilitate opportunities for collaboration.
Clearly, the optimally designed program is a hybrid, containing some expertise emphasizing specific environmental compartments, some that cuts across compartments, and some that focuses on tools needed to characterize compartments and processes and to
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 simulate natural and engineered systems. Expertise focused on specific environmental compartments would include:
 air - meteorology, climate simulation, aerobiology [e.g., virus transport]; atmospheric chemistry, photochemistry, indoor air chemistry, combustion chemistry;
 water - aquatic chemistry, fluid mechanics, hydrology, oceanography;
 soil and sediment - soil and sediment chemistry, microbiology, and physics;
 biota - ecotoxicology and macroecology.
Cross-cutting expertise would include: expertise in mass transfer, particle dynamics, environmental organic chemistry, microbial physiology, microbial ecology, subsurface solute transport, environmental toxicology, limnology, and environmental biotechnology.
Expertise associated with critical tools would include molecular biology, numerical modeling, analytical chemistry, systems analysis, and geostatistics. Of course, development and implementation of environmental policy and technology has critical social, political, and economic dimensions. Thus, an optimally designed science and engineering program should link to other programs containing such expertise.
The chart attached to this document outlines our vision for the Environmental and Water
Studies Program. Shown in the table are areas of expertise, an indication of our current level of coverage and our desired level of coverage in these areas, and tactics for attaining our vision for desired level of expertise. This table provides a framework for planning future appointments and strategic partners within the university. Our goal is to be excellent in critical core areas, with reliance on expertise in other departments to sustain adequate coverage in selected disciplines.
3. Foundational Strengths and Intersecting Interests
Environmental and Water Studies at Stanford comprises two complementary programs, viz., Environmental Engineering and Science, and Environmental Fluid Mechanics and
Hydrology. Each has its own great strengths and strong foci, but we see increasing collaborations between the two programs as a critical direction for our future.
Foundational Strengths
Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology Program: The Environmental Fluid
Mechanics and Hydrology Program is made up of seven tenure line faculty (one of whom is also director of the Urban Studies Program) and involves approximately 15 M.S. students, 40 Ph.D. students, including several DOD and NSF fellows, 3 postdocs, and 1 research associate. Total annual research funding is approximately $1.5 million.
Focused on solving challenging environmental problems, the Environmental Fluid
Mechanics and Hydrology Program has five significant core strength areas.
Fundamentals of fluid mechanics and transport
Six faculty members in this program have deep training and experience in the basic mathematics and physics of fluid motions. Two are deeply involved at the cutting edge of both surface-water and ground water hydrologic processes; two are expert in the fluid mechanics of the ocean, estuaries and bays; and two have strengths in atmospheric
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 processes and motion. The seventh member of our team is a specialist in water resources and environmental planning.
Expertise in the methods of physical experiments
In the context of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, the group has developed a worldwide reputation for using state-of-the-art equipment to carry out sophisticated laboratory and field experimentation. This work has particularly focused on stratified flows, environmental boundary layers, and on ecologically relevant flow physics.
Expertise in the methods of numerical experiments [or simulations]
The group is world-leading in the area of numerical simulation. Our breadth includes atmospheric modeling at all scales, from the boundary-layer to global, and sophisticated stochastic modeling of both fluid motion and chemical transport in the groundwater regime. We have demonstrated clearly the need for simulation of the environment in three dimensions and time, and enjoy a world-class reputation for our applications in the areas of bay/estuary and atmospheric pollution modeling. Our faculty has created advancements both in numerical algorithms and in the actual models of the physical, biological, and chemical processes.
Knowledge of engineering systems
Although our primary core strengths lie in the areas described above, the program team has well-known abilities in the assemblage of physical and numerical concepts into integrated realizations. These can take the form of integration of engineering, political, and environmental plans and assessments or application, for example, of sophisticated numerical tools to show the interplay of fluid motions, sediments, and the planned intrusion of airport runways into San Francisco Bay.
Collaboration skills
A core strength is our ability to build successful collaborations - on campus, in
California, in the U.S., and around the world. This allows us to be broader, more influential, and more successful than otherwise possible for an isolated group. Clearly, we have collaborated on many occasions with our colleagues in EE&S, but we also have significant links locally to the USGS and to UC Berkeley, as well as to overseas collaborations with Canada, PR China, Israel, Australia, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy, for example.
Environmental Engineering and Science Program
The Environmental Engineering and Science (EES) Program is world-renowned and includes five tenure line faculty, one teaching faculty, and one research faculty. The program at any point in time typically has about 30 MS students, 3-4 Engineers Degree students, 30 Ph.D. students, 10 Postdoctoral Fellows, and 6 Research Associates. The program has an annual research-grant-generated budget of approximately $3.8 million.
The faculty are diverse in areas of expertise and cumulative experience, providing the basic resource for the fundamental engineering and science grounding upon which the
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001
EES Program has been built. Collectively, the faculty represents significant core strengths as outlined below.
Fundamentals of Biotechnology
The EES Program faculty has a long history of cutting edge work in the area of environmental biotechnology. For example, long-standing work on anaerobic processes since the early 1960's has contributed to improved reliability of traditional anaerobic processes and led the way for development of novel techniques for groundwater cleanup.
Three faculty continue to make fundamental contributions to the basic science underpinning bioremediation technologies for groundwater contamination. In addition, two faculty direct pioneering work in novel biofilm processes and biomembrane technologies.
Fundamentals of Microbial Processes
Three faculty have rigorous training and extensive experience in the areas important to understanding microbial processes, including microbial metabolism, biodiversity, and microbial ecology. Although they have diverse interests, a common theme is the application of the basic scientific tools to environmental problems. This includes cuttingedge research on the microbiology of biofilms, the evaluation of enzymes and pathways for the degradation of hazardous organic chemicals, and the molecular biology of microbial transformations. Work in the emerging area of biogeochemistry and geomicrobiology explores the interactions of microbes, biofilms, and minerals.
Expertise in Fundamentals of Physicochemical Processes
The program has a worldwide reputation for fundamental work on chemical processes in engineered and natural environments. The group has expertise in mechanistic aspects of chemical kinetics of redox reactions (catalysis), thermodynamics of surface reactions, and gas phase reactions, including aerosols. Cutting edge work continues on fundamental mechanistic aspects of organic and inorganic contaminant interactions in complex environments such as soils, sediments, and aquifers. One faculty leads innovative research on the physics and chemistry of aerosols, including bioaerosols. Three faculty have strength in the area of mass transfer and transport with application to water quality engineering and management. This emphasis includes research on sorption processes, interphase mass transfer, and transformation reactions for hazardous chemicals, especially synthetic or persistent organic chemicals in aquatic systems. We are recognized for elucidating physicochemical mechanisms important to phase partitioning, contaminant availability, and abiotic transformation of organic compounds important to water quality engineering, and soil and sediment quality.
Expertise in Field/Laboratory Interactive Investigations
In the early 1970’s the EES Program initiated one of the very first field research projects on wastewater reclamation and groundwater recharge. The group maintains leadership in this field by refining the linkages between laboratory investigations and field experimental observations. These types of complex studies, necessarily interdisciplinary, require special skill and experience acquired over many projects. A critical element requisite to being a leader in the field/lab investigation area is the development and
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 maintenance of a sophisticated, cutting edge analytical facility. The EES Program faculty has invested heavily in such a facility and its continual maintenance and upgrading.
Interdisciplinary Collaborations
The EES Program faculty comprises individuals from widely different scientific and engineering backgrounds. This has been a tradition since the early 1970's and led early on to the development of joint collaborative work among the EES faculty, which continues to this day. The EES faculty has longstanding collaborations with other scientists and engineers at national laboratories (LBL, LLNL, LANL, ORNL, PNNL,
INEEL), at other academic institutions (e.g., University of Arizona, Oregon State
University), the USGS, and local and regional governmental agencies (e.g., Los Angeles
County Sanitation, Orange County Wastewater), as well as with industrial partners (e.g.,
Ford Motor Co., EFX Systems, Gas Technology Institute, Schlumberger). Additional collaborations are international (e.g., EWAWG (Switzerland), KAIST (Korea), Mexican
National Institute for Water Technology, Singapore).
Areas of Intersecting Interests
If one examines the core strengths of the two programs, it becomes clear that there are many overlapping interests. Much of the intersecting interests lie in the transport and transformation of materials [sediments and aerosols], pollutants, biological species, etc.
The EFM&H group addresses the fundamentals for the fluid motions, while the EES group addresses chemical and biological processes and rates, and interactions among the transformed and transported entities. Both groups combine laboratory and field experimental observations for both engineered and natural systems. Areas of application include groundwater management and cleanup, contaminant transport and fate, and ecologically-relevant fluid flow and chemical behavior.
4.
What Do We Need?
Our vision for the academic thrust of the program rests on the following two premises.
First, over the next five years two critical members of our program (Street and Masters) will be retiring. These two faculty members have contributed greatly to the success of our student mentoring, undergraduate teaching, and environmental expertise and breadth.
Thus we must consider carefully how to fill the gaps their departures create. Second, in order to build the kind of program described in our vision we need to strengthen it by adding additional faculty over the next five to ten years. The six areas in which we would like to invest replacement and additional billets are described below. In addition, we outline a plan for strengthening our interactions with other faculty and other programs at Stanford through courtesy appointments.
We also must meet critical needs for a major investment in upgrading our teaching and research facilities to take advantage of advances in biological technologies, information technology, networks, and in the Bio-X program. Given the growth of our laboratory and field-based research programs, we also need to invest in a sustainable management structure by hiring laboratory directors and managers.
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001
4.1 Faculty Issues
4.1.1 Embark on a vigorous program of faculty renewal and recruitment
Establishment of a program that is focused on the issues outlined in our vision statement will bring together individuals that use the tools of biology, chemistry, and physics to analyze and engineer environmental systems. The result will be a cohesive and comprehensive graduate and undergraduate program, with integrated teaching, a more unified front for recruitment, enhanced communications, an expanded collaborative research environment, and much improved multi-media capabilities. To implement this program, we propose hiring faculty in the following six areas:
Position 1. Engineer with Expertise in the Computation of Multi-scale
Environmental Fluid Processes
The Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology program has redefined the paradigm for the study of fluids in civil and environmental engineering. This new paradigm has little to do with traditional civil engineering hydraulics, e.g., the study of pipelines and open channels, but everything to do with the study of motions in large water bodies and what they transport in the ground, surface waters, oceans, estuaries, lakes, reservoirs, and the atmosphere.
Our program requires a person with great strength and depth in the fundamentals of fluid mechanics and pollution transport and at the same time strength in the processes and tools of numerical simulation of the motions and transports that define the issues of the day.
Thus, this person must be able at once to advance the state of the art of environmental fluid mechanics and hydrology and of the numerical tools used to simulate them. Over their career, this person will be expected to contribute widely across the program, e.g., to problems ranging from river restoration to groundwater pollution transport with chemical and biological interactions to coastal or river sediment transport to lower atmosphere winds and pollution transport to internal waves in the coastal ocean and lakes.
Position 2. Environmental Scientist with Expertise on the Fate of Organics in
Aquatic Systems and Ecological Functioning of Natural Surface Waters
This faculty would be involved in the detection, modeling, and fate of organic chemicals in natural systems, including uptake and accumulation in aquatic food chains. This person's background will create an important bridge between the physical transportoriented work of the EFMH group, the environmental organic chemist (position 3), and the chemical behavior and transformation-oriented research in EES. This faculty member is critical in order to apply the understanding of microscale processes developed by the microbiologists and environmental chemists to solving problems of macroscopic ecosystems and engineered systems. This research activity will provide the environmental engineer with important modeling tools in problem solving and engineering understanding of natural ecosystems and quantitative characterization of
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 ecosystem level effects. The expertise will enable us to tackle complex real-world ecosystems in studying how contaminants spread, transform, and impact our environment.
Position 3: Environmental Organic Chemist
Each year, thousands of new organic molecules are synthesized in industry, and a significant fraction of those compounds are released into natural ecosystems. For example, it is increasingly clear that personal care products, including pharmaceuticals and consumer drugs, are prevalent at low levels in municipal wastewater. Compounds such as estradiol, derived from birth control pills, are not removed in wastewater treatment plants and have strong biological affects by functioning as endocrine disrupters.
Furthermore, we lack satisfactory, sensitive analytical techniques to measure and track important classes of chemicals in the environment, for example, fluorohydrocarbons, widely used to coat paper cups and in fabric protectors [e.g., the now-discontinued
Scotch-Gard].
In many environmental systems, the rates of abiotic transformation for organic compounds may be the same order of magnitude or faster than those mediated by biological processes. This results in delicate, complex transformations and interactions between the biotic and abiotic worlds. The work of the environmental organic chemist will provide the scientific understanding of these interactions for persistent, biologicallyactive organic compounds. This knowledge is critical for the engineer when evaluating new products and green chemistry, as well as for designing successful prevention or treatment strategies. The contributions of an environmental organic chemist is pivotal to many research areas in the program, such as microbial transformation rates, abiotic degradation pathways and mechanisms, transformation product behavior, and ecosystem effects.
A new, junior faculty member in environmental organic chemistry will develop and apply the most sophisticated analytical tools to identify novel organic chemicals and to elucidate the chemical transformations and fate of organic molecules in natural and engineered aqueous systems. A vigorous, innovative research program in environmental organic chemistry captures Stanford’s focus on the real-world environment, here addressing chemical interactions and transformations in complex, heterogeneous systems.
Furthermore, the teaching component of a faculty in environmental organic chemistry will impact Stanford’s undergraduate education beyond the Environmental Engineering
Program (see below). We envision that this faculty member will have a link, in form of a courtesy appointment, with the Chemistry or Chemical Engineering Department.
Position 4. Environmental scientist with an expertise in limnology, aquatic ecology, and surface water hydrology and engineering of surface water ecosystems.
This position involves a blend of traditional engineering strengths of quantitative analysis and problem solving with modern environmental sciences like microbial ecology and limnology. The faculty member would be an expert in the quantitative characterization of
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 the ecological functioning of natural surface waters, i.e., translating scientific understanding of aquatic systems into predictions of system behavior. Problems include ecological habitat restoration, water supply reliability (harmful algal blooms and others), fisheries and food, etc. The person’s background would include limnology, geochemistry, marine biology, fluid mechanics, physical oceanography, and computational sciences. We envision that this faculty member could also have a courtesy appointment in the Department of Biological Sciences.
Presently, much of our expertise in limnology and aquatic ecology, phytoplankton ecology, etc. comes from our interactions with the USGS - people such as Jim Cloern,
Jan Thompson, and Sam Luoma. We should not stake our reputations or activities in this very important area on our faith that these people and/or the USGS will be continue to be viable in Menlo Park. Having in-house expertise in these areas is important to building up our capability of characterizing the physical/biological/fluid mechanical interactions that occur in fresh-water and near-coastal ocean systems. Such knowledge is critical to our stated goal of developing relevant predictive tools for such systems.
Position 5. Engineer with an expertise in water resources planning and policy focusing particularly on issues regarding water supply
Engineering of large-scale water resources systems involves integration of significant elements of policy and economics with more traditional engineering sciences like fluid mechanics or aquatic chemistry. Accordingly, recent NSF/EPA RFPs for large programs on aquatic ecosystems as well as significant parts of the local CalFed Bay-Delta program have stipulated a policy component to any proposed study. We endorse this approach and feel it is essential to have an in-house person supplying a policy dimension to the interdisciplinary studies of ecosystems and hydrologic analyses. Our model for the kind of person we have in mind is an individual with good technical knowledge of hydrology, hydrological systems, and environmental planning and policy analysis who focuses on issues that are critical to sustainability. One example would be an individual with research interests in drought management and mitigation strategies, etc. Other examples might include studies of policies aimed at balancing agricultural water use with demands for increased environmental protection. Another example is a person with expertise in environmental impact assessment and its application to the built, natural, and human environments.
This person adds an important perspective to our program by extending the technical expertise of the EWS group and by introducing issues of long-term planning and policy analysis to the types of societal problems that civil and environmental engineers can help solve. Such problems require an understanding of both the science and the societal context of decision-making. Ideally, the individual in this position would be able to integrate environmental and water resources engineering with economics, organization theory, policy analysis and planning. Overall, the technically based policy interests of this person will add an important perspective to the program as it extends the technical expertise of the EWS group to consider important long term policy planning strategies.
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001
Given their stated focus on environmental issues, we can easily imagine this person having a joint appointment with the Institute of International Studies.
Position 6. Engineer with an expertise in sustainable energy technology and policy
At the current time a proposal to hire two new faculty members (incremental billets) in the School of Engineering is being formulated under the leadership of Gil Masters. The plan is to engage a number of departments in the school, including Civil and
Environmental, Mechanical, and Electrical Engineering in this endeavor. It is envisaged that one of these billets would be in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a possible joint appointment with IIS. If this proposal is successful, the CEE department would seek a candidate whose research and teaching combines energy-related science and technology with environmental issues and energy policy. Possible subject areas include new or improved energy generation technologies, alternative energy systems including renewables and energy efficiency, distributed energy resources and systems, impacts of energy systems on the environment—including especially climate change, as well as acid deposition, urban smog, and indoor air quality—carbon sequestration and carbon trading, environmental impacts of electric-utility restructuring, transportation systems, and energy in global economic development.
4.1.2 Offer Strategic Courtesy Appointments
The proposed program will be designed to formalize and expand existing collaborative relationships of strategic importance. The environmental science and engineering expertise on campus is poorly integrated. A general view of the program is summarized in the accompanying table.
To further develop the above program, we consider proposing courtesy appointments to faculty members in other departments with expertise that complements our, e.g.,
Scott Fendorf (Dept of Geological and Environmental Sciences)
– soil and bio/geo/chemistry
Gordon Brown (Dept of Geological and Environmental Sciences)
– geochemistry
Gary Schoolnik (Dept of Medicine, Geographic Medicine & Infectious Disease)
– microbial pathogens in the environment,
Jim Swartz (Dept of Chemical Engineering)
– biotechnology for clean energy production
Rob Dunbar (Dept of Geological and Environmental Sciences)
– oceanography and ocean margins
Pam Matson (Dept of Geological and Environmental Sciences)
– biogeochemical cycling
Integrating expertises from the SoE, SoM, SoES, and SoH&S into the technical program of Environmental Science and Engineering will generate an important research and
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 teaching thrust that will place Stanford in a highly visible leadership position for environmental research.
4.2 Facilities
4.2.1 Create a set of specialty research laboratories targeting critical research areas
Creation of research laboratories will consolidate resources and create new resources that enable us to provide more attractive undergraduate and graduate lab offerings. Furthermore, creation of targeted laboratories will allow us to be more competitive for research funds, especially in emerging and topical research areas. Such laboratory facilities will greatly enhance our competitiveness in raising research funds because in writing such proposals we will be able to describe critical core capabilities as part of a dedicated university facility. These laboratories will concentrate on key research questions and technologies. The laboratories will not only be equipped with state-of the art instruments but will also represent an intellectual focal point for ground-breaking research in the respective areas.
Proposed and existing targeted environmental laboratories:
 Stanford Biofilm Research Laboratory Facility [in development] – This Biofilm facility was recently initiated and is substantially funded by the Bio-X program. The facility will be available to the Stanford community as a service center and will facilitate cutting-edge research in microbial biofilms. Microbial biofilms are at the core of many environmental science and engineering issues and are a particluarly good example for the interconnectedness of environmental research as it integrates molecular microbial processes, ecological interactions, geochemcial processes, and complex hydrodynamics. Director: Spormann
 Membrane Research Laboratory [proposed, initiatives underway] — The activities of this laboratory will center around reverse osmosis technology as well as advanced membrane technology for separation and water treatment. New materials for membranes will be explored, as well as new concepts for control of beneficial biofilms on these membranes will be explored. These research activities form a naturally link to those in the biofilm research laboratory. Recent collaborative research activities with the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have provided critical momentum and seed funds. Director: Leckie
 Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory [existing] — Renovated with Stanford and NSF funds in 1995, this laboratory is made up of 7 faculty, over 30 PhD students, and, and in recent months, as many as 6 postdocs. The activities of the lab fall in several areas. Director: Monismith
(1) Laboratory experiments: The EFML houses what is arguably the best set of experimental facilities of its kind in the US, including tanks and flumes for stratified, rotating, wavy, and turbulent boundary layer flows as well as extensive
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 instrumentation for study of these flows. Boundary layer flows with biological elements (e.g., coral, clams,..) are of special interest.
(2) Field studies: Complimenting laboratory studies of environmental flows, in the last 5 years we have developed a substantial field research effort focusing on flows and mixing in lakes, estuaries and the near-shore coastal ocean including coral reefs and kelp forests. We were recently awarded a DURIP that will enable us to acquire an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that will be used for unmanned exploration and mapping of lakes, estuaries, and the coastal ocean.
(3) Computation: Supported by the facilities now organized under the PMECC, computational work in the lab covers a broad range of scales and processes, including one that are very basic, e.g., mixing produced by a breaking internal wave, to very applied, e.g., computing modifications of San Francisco Bay circulation by new runways proposed to be built by filling a part of San Francisco Bay. We also have an active program in computational atmospheric science that includes studies of smallerscale phenomena like the formation of air pollution in the Bay Area air-shed as well as of global modifications of the atmosphere by soot. We are active in the development of advanced numerical tools for all of these classes of flow and the embedded biology and chemistry.
(4) Hydrological processes: Another focus of the lab is the analysis, simulation, and prediction of hydrologic processes in the environment and during environmental remediation. In addition to a longstanding focus on water flow and contaminant transport in the subsurface, current projects are examining riparian zone restoration, reservoir sediment management, and ephemeral streamflow and recharge using tools ranging from stochastic analysis and large-scale numerical simulation to field experiments.
 Sediments Research Laboratory [proposed, initiatives underway] — This laboratory would address the behavior, effects, and management of chemical contaminants in sediments. The activities would provide cross-disciplinary research for faculty working on physicochemical processes, environmental organic chemistry, ecological functioning of natural surface waters, and environmental fluid mechanics. Integrated research from microscale processes affecting organic compound availability to largerscale processes including food web dynamics would be addressed. The research reaches to biology and the Hopkins Marine Station on themes linking sediment chemistry to toxicity and bioaccumulation.
A teaching component can be accommodated at a new Bay facility [see discussion later]. Director: Luthy
 Analytical Chemistry Laboratory [existing] — This laboratory has been a strong-hold for the environmental engineering and science program as it provides critical facilities and innovative methodologies to identify and detect organic compounds in complex environmental samples. The initiative in environmental organic chemistry will help us maintain leadership in this area. Director: Reinhard
 The Peter A. McCuen Environmental Computing Center [existing] — The Peter A.
McCuen computer center was established in 2000 with a large gift that enabled us to purchase a 40 cpu Beowulf cluster parallel-processing supercomputer named
“Baywulf”. In addition to Baywulf, the McCuen center also offers users an aging
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001
Cray J916 mini-supercomputer, a 10 processor Silicon Graphics Origin, and 6 other
SGI workstations. Research carried out in the McCuen center focuses on the application of advanced numerical methods to the solution of environmental flow problems. Director: Street
4.2.2 Establish one or more new teaching laboratories in environmental science and engineering (EES)
One or more laboratories open to both undergraduate and graduate students are envisioned. These new laboratories would be designed to take advantage of advances in information technology and networking and would focus on making measurements for understanding and for engineering analysis, and on the use of the internet for process monitoring and control.
The present situation is highly inadequate for a program of our stature and ranking. The environmental engineering and science laboratories are seriously outdated, and we are twenty years behind peer institutions in terms of some of our facilities. Analytical measurements are central to understanding and problem solving in environmental engineering and science. Environmental engineering is highly empirical and measurement-based. Students need hands-on experience both in-house and in the field, and need to be familiar with state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation. Currently, our undergraduates in the environmental option in CEE do not receive adequate exposure to environmental measurements. The only current laboratory experiences for most of our undergraduates are in fluid mechanics and elementary aquatic chemistry.
Our students must also be introduced to modern methods of analysis of environmental samples, including data reduction, precision, and accuracy. More so than ever before, the volume and complexity of environmental data overwhelms environmental engineers and scientists. We do have considerable experience in using modern instruments in the research domain which should be exploited here. For example, Perry McCarty and Gary
Hopkins pioneered the use of automated sampling and measurement systems, and telemetry for the evaluation of groundwater remediation. Stephen Monismith currently makes extensive use of telemetry in his research on natural systems.
Automated measurement systems and telemetry to obtain environmental data will continue to be a vital aspect of our research program. A teaching laboratory that provides such exposure will be a valuable training tool for student researchers. Furthermore, automated measurement systems and telemetry are rapidly moving into engineering consulting practice. Several consultants have indicated that they are adopting these strategies in their work, and some are now using the Internet for process monitoring and control. Future students need to be trained to take advantage of and to advance these trends. Distributed data acquisition together with remote process monitoring and control is a critical element for environmental engineering and science.
There is a great opportunity here for us. Modern instrumented and internet-based based laboratories will enable us to update our labs so that we will be at the leading edge in
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 teaching. To our knowledge, no other major university has identified this trend and revamped their teaching laboratories accordingly. We will be the first to develop such laboratories, providing us with important competitive advantages. We expect that this change will facilitate our efforts to attract top students. In addition, development of an internet-based laboratory strategy will be of great value for the teaching of fieldwork that is a critical component of environmental fluid mechanics, air pollution monitoring, and the geological sciences. Finally, the proposed laboratory Internet facilities could be expanded to service other undergraduate classes in our department and around the university, bringing real-world measurements to the fingertips of students in their dorm rooms on a regular basis.
4.2.3
Relocate environmental engineering and science teaching laboratories
The EE&S research and teaching laboratories are located in the basement of Terman
Engineering Center and were state of the art when Terman was built in the mid-1970s.
These laboratories are now more than twenty-five years old, outdated for world class research, and seriously overcrowded. To address this problem, the School of Engineering and EES raised $3 million for renovation of about half of the current laboratory space.
Renovation of 14,000 sq ft began in December 2000. While this renovation is absolutely critical to maintaining our leading researching programs, much remains to be done. We need to renovate the remaining research laboratories, and relocate and expand teaching laboratories.
Space currently available for laboratory-based teaching in the EE&S program barely is adequate for our old style of instruction. It will not properly accommodate what we envision as appropriate for this teaching lab of the future. Further, it will not allow us to add basic undergraduate and graduate-level laboratory classes we envision as part of our new curriculum with faculty having expertise in environmental ecosystem functioning
(position 2) or environmental organic chemistry (position 3). Furthermore, even after the partial renovation, the available laboratory space in the basement earmarked for research will not be enough to accommodate the number of post-docs and students we already have. As a result, spatial overlap of research activities with nearby teaching space will continue to occur.
If we attempt to better serve the undergraduates by shoehorning teaching and research in the same space, we will have untrained students sharing hallways and conducting class exercises in close proximity to research areas containing microbial pathogens, hazardous chemicals, and radioactive materials. Safety will clearly be improved by teaching in dedicated facilities rather than within the confines of research laboratories. Experience has shown that the county safety inspections are problematic when the research and teaching laboratories are co-mingled, because the entire basement area must be painstakingly investigated for regulatory violations caused by inexperienced students.
Clearly, separation of teaching and research lab would prevent problems with misuse of equipment, would enhance laboratory safety, and most importantly would facilitate instruction.
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001
One potential location for the new EE&S teaching laboratory is the Mechanical
Engineering space on the 5 th floor of the Terman Engineering Center. We envision utilizing this space for instructional purposes four quarters of the year. In the autumn, the internet-based modules would become a new part of the existing undergraduate Fluid
Mechanics Lab; in the winter, the combined undergraduate/graduate Aquatic Chemistry
Lab would meet there regularly; and in the spring, the Treatment Technology and the
Environmental Microbiology Laboratory courses would be held there. As mentioned above, we anticipate that the to-be-hired faculties in environmental organic chemistry and aquatic ecology will teach critically needed undergraduate courses in these teaching lab facilities. The summer quarter would be an ideal time to offer intensive, Ph.D.-level courses in advanced organic analytical techniques.
In no way can the current teaching facility in the Terman basement accommodate these educational plans. Additional fume hoods are needed which cannot be installed in the basement cost-effectively. However, the 5 th floor provides a unique opportunity for extending the Terman fume hood system at low costs because of its vicinity to the outside via the roof. In short, this space is clearly ideal for teaching laboratory classes.
In addition, we anticipate expanded use of teaching laboratories for summer institutes.
Large, multi-investigator grants from the NSF require outreach at the secondary level and to under-represented groups. We envision that environmental engineering and science and fluid mechanics provide opportunity for engaging junior/high school students in the excitement of cross-disciplinary instruction in physics, chemistry, and biology. Thus, in response to some NSF proposals we propose hosting a summer institute for secondary school-level science teachers, for which the teaching laboratories would be an important component providing hands-on learning and the development of environmental teaching modules for use in junior/high school science classes. Presently we would be pressed to accommodate this activity in the current laboratories due to overcrowding, safety, and the mismatch between use for Ph.D. research versus outreach and enrichment for science teachers.
4.2.4
Develop a new field facility on San Francisco Bay for teaching and research
As our field program on estuaries and lakes continues to grow and broaden, in light of our proposal to add new faculty with interests in surface water ecological processes, it has become clear that a field facility located on San Francisco Bay, and offering our faculty and students use of small boats, an area for staging equipment, and wet lab facilities, would be a valuable asset to our program. Because of its utility to the Ocean
Margins program as well, this facility would be jointly operated with and used by the
School of Earth Sciences. We imagine this facility, ideally located on Stanford’s land on
Redwood Creek next to the Marine Science Institute, and near the USGS Marine Facility would include a space for preparing and calibrating equipment for field use, a classroom/seminar room to be used for meetings and for teaching classes, a laboratory that includes pumped Bay water for work with organisms, as well as storage space for field equipment. The station would provide several small boats including one larger boat capable of working in San Francisco Bay or of being put on a trailer, and then driven to
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 and launched in other water bodies like Lake Tahoe, Clear Lake, Elkhorn Slough near
Monterey, or any of the north coast estuaries. Like the EES teaching labs, we would look to use these facilities in educational out-reach and enrichment activities including those offered Stanford alumni by the Alumni Association.
Over the past few years we have held some discussions with Athletic Director, Ted
Leland about building an academic facility in the new boathouse facility to be located on
Redwood Shores. We have not had recent contact with Leland about this proposal but at the time of our most recent discussions he felt that an academic facility would be an excellent addition to the planned boathouse. These discussions need to be reactivated.
4.3
Resources
4.3.1 Hires of Research Engineers/Scientists as executive directors of the EFMH and of the EE&S laboratory, respectively
The Environmental Engineering and Science laboratory is home to over 50 researchers comprising graduate students, postdocs, research associates, staff, and faculty. Yet, it has no infrastructure where the laboratory operations are managed on a day-by-day basis.
The EE&S program is in critical need of a laboratory MS or Ph.D.-level manager who oversees the day-to-day operations, as well as maintains the research equipment.
Since its founding in 1985, the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory has had an ever broadening scope of research. As a consequence our current research and teaching make use of a large number of computers, as well as a wide variety of sophisticated laboratory and field instrumentation. It has become clear that the EFML requires a staff engineer/ scientist to operate at the cutting edge in support of our technology both in classroom and laboratory instruction and in the program's research efforts. We expect that such a person would have a Ph.D. in an area related to environmental fluid mechanics,
We envisage that the two such individuals described above would take on the day-to-day responsibilities of administering the laboratories, especially with respect to the upkeep of our research instruments and computational tools. We expect that these individuals would be actively involved and supported by research, and would provide support teaching in the laboratory courses on an annual basis.
For both positions, the individuals would operate with the title of Executive Director.
4.3.2 Raise funds for prestigious Ph.D. student fellowships in both EE&S and
EFMH
Many programs such as Berkeley and MIT have prestigious, endowed fellowships. They are very effective as a means of recognizing students for their achievement and for recruiting highly sought after students. We can honor former faculty members and alumni
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001 by naming the fellowships for them, e.g., The Rolf Eliassen Fellowship in Environmental
Engineering and Science, The Ray K. Linsley Fellowship in Hydrologic Sciences, etc.
4.3.3
Raise endowment for operating the Environmental Engineering and Science, and Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratories
We need a continuing source of funds for a) cost-sharing in the acquisition of major instruments for general use in the laboratory, b) maintaining our supercomputing capability in a sustainable way (annual upkeep and maintenance and replacement), and c) making general purchases that are otherwise disallowed on individual research contracts.
An endowment on the scale of that for an endowed professorship would also provide us with some of the means of funding the Executive Director positions described above on a long-term basis.
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The Vision of the Environmental and Water Studies Program, February 20, 2001
Our vision of EW S
Compartment expertise:
Water
Aquatic chemistry
Fluid mechanics
Hydrology
Oceanography
Water resources planning
Microbiology
Aquatic ecology
Air
Meteorology - field experimental
Climate simulation
Aerobiology
Photochemistry simulation
Photochemistry - experimental
Indoor air quality
Volatile and particulate emissions
Soil/sediment
Chemistry
Microbiology
Physics
Biota
Ecotoxicology
Cross-cutting expertise:
Expertise in mass transfer
Particle dynamics
Environmental organic chemistry
Microbial physiology
Microbial ecology
Subsurface solute transport
Limnology
Environmental biotechnology
Exposure assessment
Energy use/efficiency
Expertise associated with tools:
Molecular biology
Numerical modeling
Analytical chemistry
Environmental systems analysis
Geostatistics
Current Desired level level
(5 yrs)
Apptmts to maintain
TACTICS
Apptmts to build position 3 position 1 position 1 position 5
Strategic partnerships
GES
ME
GES
Geophysics, GES positions 4,5
Biology
Biology
SJSU
IIS, Biology position 3
ME
ME position 3 GES
Biology, GES
GES position 2 Biology position 3 position 4 position 6
Chem Eng, ME
ME
Chem
Biology
GES
USGS
Chem Eng
ME, EE, IIS, Pet. E position 1 position 5 position 3
Biology, MED
ME, CS
Chem
GES
Geophysic, G ES
Key to rankings
Excellent
Needs improvement
Nonexistent
Key to positions:
1. Engineer with expertise in advanced computational processes, multi-scale env. fluid
2. Environmental scientist: fate of organics, ecofunctioning of surface waters.
3. Environmental organic chemist
4. Environmental scientist: limnology, aquatic ecology, surface water ecosystem engineering
5. Water resources planning and policy
6. Sustainable Energy Technology and Policy
Other closely related expertise combustion chemistry policy environmental law macroecology epidemiology marine biology energy resources geology remote sensing
Where found?
mechanical engineering environmental law and urban studies law school biological sciences medical school: epidemiology, health research and policy biological sciences, Hopkins Marine station petroleum engineering geological and environmental sciences geophysics
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