Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Contact Card
Russell Detwiler, Ph.D. Associate
Professor & Graduate Advisor
detwiler@uci.edu
(949) 824-7152
Environmental & Energy Systems
Treatment, distribution and collection of water and wastewater are energy intensive
operations, and energy generation and distribution have direct and indirect impacts
on environmental systems. This area addresses these interrelated challenges by focusing
on the treatment and supply of water for municipal agricultural, energy, and environmental
uses, sustainable practices for managing urban stormwater, and chemical and microbiological
processes for water treatment. Additionally, novel approaches for energy generation
and distribution are covered in this area. Understanding and minimizing emissions
of greenhouse gasses associated with water and wastewater treatment and energy generation
and distribution are common themes in this area.
Faculty
Amir AghaKouchak
UCI Chancellor's Professor
Ph.D. University of Stuttgart, Germany
Modeling hydroclimate extremes, remote sensing of environment, hydrologic processes,
and climate change and variability
Tirtha Banerjee
Associate Professor
Ph.D. Duke University
Atmospheric boundary layer dynamics, turbulent fluid dynamics, land/water/vegetation
- atmosphere interaction, wildfires, vegetation dynamics, carbon and water cycles,
hydrology, wetlands and terrestrial aquatic interfaces
Jack Brouwer
Professor
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advanced energy technologies, fuel cells, energy sources and pollutant emission
Russell Detwiler
Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Colorado
Groundwater hydrology, contaminant fate and transport, subsurface process modeling,
groundwater/surface-water interaction
Derek Dunn-Rankin
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Combustion, optical particle sizing, particle aero-dynamics, laser diagnostics and
spectroscopy
Efi Foufoula-Georgiou
Distinguished Professor
Ph.D. University of Florida
Hydrology and geomorphology with emphasis on modeling the interactions between the
atmosphere, land, and the terrestrial environment at plot to large-watershed scale
Shakira Hobbs
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Clemson University
Global sustainability, resource recovery from anthropogenic waste, and life cycle
thinking applied to engineering equity at the food-energy-water nexus
Kuo-lin Hsu
Professor
Ph.D. University of Arizona
Hydrologic modeling; artificial neural network applications in hydrology
C. Sunny Jiang
Professor
Ph.D. University of South Florida
Water pollution microbiology, environmental biotechnology, aquatic microbial ecology
Phu Nguyen
Adjunct Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Irvine
Flood warnings, global extreme satellite precipitation event database using object-oriented
approaches, integrated system for global satellite precipitation and information,
and global real-time satellite and crowdsourced precipitation observations for hydrologic
and natural disaster management applications
Christopher Olivares Martinez
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Arizona
Environmental biotechnology, remediation, metabolomics, pollutant fate in natural
and engineered systems, microbial toxicity, environmental organic chemistry
James Randerson
UCI Chancellor's Professor
Ph.D. Stanford University
Fires, greenhouse gases, land cover change, tropical deforestation, global change
in arctic and boreal ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles, remote sensing and climate
policy
Eric Rignot
Professor
Ph.D. University of Southern California
Physical climate
Diego Rosso
Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles
Environmental process engineering, mass transfer, wastewater treatment, carbon- and
energy-footprint analysis
Scott Samuelsen
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Energy, fuel cells, hydrogen economy, propulsion, combustion and environmental conflict;
turbulent transport in complex flows, spray physics, NOx and soot formation, laser
diagnostics and experimental methods; application of engineering science to practical
propulsion and stationary systems; environmental ethics
Brett Sanders
UCI Chancellor's Professor
Ph.D. University of Michigan
Environmental and computational fluid dynamics, water resources engineering
Jean-Daniel Saphores
Professor
Ph.D. Cornell University
Transportation economics, planning and policy, environmental and natural resource
economics and policy, quantitative methods
Jasper Vrugt
Professor
Ph.D. University of Amsterdam
Ecology, aerosol-cloud interactions, hydrometeorology, parallel computing, uncertainty
quantification, data assimilation, parameter estimation, Bayesian statistics