Emerging Contaminants Short Course 2024

Dr. Patrick McNamara is an associate professor of Environmental Engineering at Marquette University and a Wastewater Process Engineer with Black & Veatch. He has over 15 years experience in wastewater solids and residuals management, and his research group has investigated emerging contaminants for a decade. His work is funded by the National Science Foundation, utilities, companies, and foundations. He has over 60 peer-reviewed journal publications.

Dr. Brooke Mayer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at Marquette University.  She graduated from the Environmental Engineering program at Arizona State University (B.S. – 2004, M.S. – 2006, Ph.D. – 2008), where she taught from 2008 – 2012.  Her research and teaching interests focus on physical/chemical water treatment, particularly microbial disinfection and nutrient recovery.

Martye has always been about the ‘WE’ in ‘WATER’ and how human decisions impact water quality.

Martye received his bachelor’s degree from Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. He then received a graduate degree in biology from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, examining the impacts of excess nutrients on coastal ecosystems. He has over 20 years of experience working in the public and private sectors looking holistically at the interaction between human land use and water quality. With increasing societal and regulatory pressure to produce cleaner water than ever, it costs more to clean water after it is polluted than preventing the pollution in the first place.

In his role, Martye focuses on solving problems adaptively to move at the speed of trust. Working in communities focusing on pollution prevention is just the way we must do business.

Martye joined the District in 2017.

Zihao Lu is a Ph. D candidate in Civil Engineering with a specialization in environmental and water resources engineering at Marquette University. His research focuses on antibiotic resistance in the engineered environments, and the impacts of organic disinfectants in residuals and biosolids treatment. He received his B.S. in Bioengineering from Dalian Polytechnic University, M.S. in Civil Engineering from Marquette University.

Bill Mitch is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University.  He has studied disinfection byproduct formation mechanisms over the past 20 years, with a particular focus on nitrosamines.  His research focuses on conventional drinking water and potable reuse, including MF/RO/AOP systems, O₃/BAC-based systems, advanced oxidation processes and treatment of RO concentrate. He has evaluated techniques to minimize the formation of disinfection byproducts.  He obtained a BA in Archaeology from Harvard University and MS and PhD degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.  He received the 2004 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors and Parsons Engineering, and a NSF Career Award in 2007. He served as the Chair of the 2017 Disinfection Byproducts Gordon Conference. He holds a PE license in California.

Dr. Jacelyn Rice-Boayue is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University. Previously, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the International Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering in Burkina Faso and a postdoctoral research fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology. Dr. Rice-Boayue earned her Ph.D. in Civil, Sustainable and Environmental Engineering from Arizona State University. Her research group aims to provide new understanding and solutions to foster sustainable water resource management. Rice-Boayue’s research combines modeling, laboratory and field studies, and social science methods to examine water quality, environmental health and contaminants, and environmental justice. Much of her work focuses on environmental exposure assessment to emerging contaminants through model-informed surveillance and field studies.

Dr. Gonzalez received a PhD in Environmental Engineering at University of Arizona and graduated in 2015. His PhD work investigated the toxic effect of metallic nanoparticles on key microbial cultures of wastewater processes and developed approaches to mitigate microbial toxicity. After his graduation, Dr. Gonzalez worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology where he worked in a project focused on waste-to-energy. In 2017, he joined the University of New Mexico as a  Postdoctoral Research Associate and later became a Research Assistant Professor. During his time at the University of New Mexico, he worked in remediation and mobilization of heavy metals and interactions of microplastics and heavy metals. Dr. Gonzalez’s current research focuses on fate, reactivity, and effect of emergent and perseverant contaminants on engineered and natural water systems and terrestrial ecosystems. His research group investigates biological and physicochemical mechanisms driving degradation processes, mobility, and effects of contaminants on water and soil. Dr. Gonzalez’s group 
aims to bridge mechanistic laboratory-based work and community environmental health to understand potential exposure pathways and develop transformative technologies

Lauren Stadler is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. She earned a B.S. in Engineering from Swarthmore College, and an M.S.E. and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Stadler is ​​an environmental engineer whose research focuses on wastewater-based epidemiology, environmental antibiotic resistance, wastewater and resource recovery, and environmental synthetic biology. She was named a “New Engineer to Watch” by the Water Environment Federation, a Gulf Research Program Early Career Fellow by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and a Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D Engineering Scholar, and is an NSF CAREER awardee.                   

Dr. Martin Page leads the operational water research team at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center.  Dr. Page leads R&D efforts relating to deployable water treatment and biological threat mitigation for military and civil works applications.     

Phillip Potter is a physical scientist with the USEPA Office of Research and Development in Cincinnati, OH. He received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Louisiana State University in 2015 while studying formation mechanisms for dioxins in incineration systems. His current research includes thermal remediation  of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), fate and transport of emerging contaminants, and nano- and microplastic environmental occurrence.