Water Quality and Management

Harrison Fraker is an award winning architect and Founding Partner of the Princeton Energy Group. Recently, he led an initiative to design three transit-oriented neighborhoods for Tianjin, China, a city of 11 million. The idea in this design is not just green buildings but whole systems, encouraging officials to integrate planning for power, water, waste and transportation for better environmental results. Fraker teaches design studio and architectural internship program and current research activity includes affordable manufactured housing, urban design, sustainable development and ecological design.

Michael's research in economics has focused largely on aspects of modeling individual choice behavior, with applications to demand forecasting, inducing conservation, environmental regulation and economic valuation. He is a leading authority on the methodology of non-market valuation using techniques of both revealed and stated preference. A team of two dozen prominent experts led by professors from the California Climate Change Center released a new report in early 2006 on the economic implications of meeting global warming emissions reduction targets established by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005. The governor's goals include reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 2000 levels by the year 2010, and to 1990 levels by 2020. "Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in California," the first report in a series of economic and technology assessments, finds that just eight policy strategies can take California halfway to the governor's 2020 targets, while increasing the Gross State Product by approximately $60 billion and creating more than 20,000 new jobs.

The focus of Dracup’s research is in the areas of hydrology and water resource systems analysis. In the area of water resources, his research work is primarily in the simulation and optimization of groundwater and large-scale river basin systems. He has taught courses on the engineering, economic and environmental aspect of transboundary and international river basins. He has extensive experience as a Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator and has managed large scale research projects including indices evaluation and has received grants from the United Nations Development Program, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Water Resources Research, among many others.

Isha Ray’s research interests are the politics and economics of access to water in developing countries, technology and development, common property resource management and social science research methods. She has research experience on problems of drinking water as well as irrigation management in India, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Mexico. She also has extensive work experience in the non-profit sector on sustainable rural development in India, and on international water-and-development problems. Professor Ray serves on the advisory committee of several water and development related NGOs and on the editorial committee of Annual Review of Environment and Resources.

Kara Nelson conducts research on the detection, removal and inactivation of pathogens in drinking water, wastewater, and sludge, as well as the identification of pollution sources and impacts on surface waters. A major focus of Professor Nelson’s work is the development of low-cost, effective treatment technologies in developing countries. She currently advises research projects in the United States, Mexico, India, Sri Lanka, and Morocco. Nelson has demonstrated a safe and inexpensive way to dramatically increase the amount of recycled wastewater that can be produced at treatment plants in California - by simply increasing the flowrate of the water through existing sand filters (see http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/forefront/spring2005/nelson.html). She is elucidating the photochemical and photobiological mechanisms by which sunlight can inactivate pathogens, with key implications for natural surface waters as well as low-cost methods for drinking water and wastewater treatment. She has invented a low-cost method for disinfecting drinking water at households in developing countries using UV light, and are now field testing the technology in Mexico and tsunami-affected regions of Sri Lanka (joint between Civil Engineering and Energy and Resources, along with Dan Kammen).

Lisa Alvarez-Cohen discovered that widely used flame retardants (poly brominated diphenyl ethers - PBDEs) are converted by naturally occurring microorganisms to highly toxic endocrine-disrupting products, resulting in potentially significant human health threats. She was the first to deduce the biochemical pathway for the breakdown of two important emerging water contaminants - N-nitrosodimethyamine (NDMA) and 1,4 dioxane. These two compounds, a product of rocket fuel that is also generated by the chlorination of wastewater, and a solvent stabilizer, respectively, have been recently responsible for the shut-down of wells involved in water-reuse systems. She has partnered with Environmental Microbiologists at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories to design and apply whole-genome microarrays to understand the growth and function of microorganisms crucial to the in situ bioremediation of chlorinated solvents such as those used in dry-cleaning and chip manufacturing. She is partnering with researchers at Nanyang Technical University to collaborate on studies using advanced aerobic granules for the treatment of a wide variety of water contaminants including pharmaceuticals and nitroaromatic compounds.

Ashok Gadgil received an award from San Jose’s (CA) Tech Museum of Innovation, which honors people who use technology to help humanity, for developing a water purification system that kills bacteria with ultraviolet light. The system, called UV Waterworks and marketed by WaterHealth International, Inc., is used daily by about 300,000 people in Mexico, the Philippines, and several other countries. Several systems will soon be installed in his native India. Money is currently being raised to install the system in tsunami-stricken regions of Sri Lanka and India. His invention appeared in Forbes Magazine in 2003. Ashok Gadgil is also developing a cheap and effective way to provide safe drinking water to 60 million Bangladeshis who live under the specter of arsenic poisoning. His idea is to create arsenic filters from coal ash, the fine gray powder that piles up at the bottom of furnaces at all coal-fired power stations, waiting to be discarded. Although still in the investigational stage, Gadgil’s technique would involve coating the ash with a compound that attracts arsenic, filling teabag-sized pouches with the powder, and distributing the filters throughout the countryside, one per family per day. Water drawn from any one of the millions of contaminated wells that dot Bangladesh could then be poured through the filter and safely consumed. Gadgil has numerous publications spanning the areas of drinking water efficiency and indoor air quality.

Sedlak discovered that iron nanoparticles can be used to oxidize chemical contaminants in water. This discovery may provide a new way of removing difficult-to-treat contaminants from drinking water supplies. He has identified the mechanisms through which the potent carcinogen NDMA (nitrosodimethylamine) forms in advanced water and wastewater treatment systems. The detection of NDMA in recycled water posed serious barriers to the implementation of water recycling programs around the world. The results of this research currently is being used to modify treatment processes for water recycling programs to prevent NDMA formation. He has also developed a means of determining if pharmaceuticals detected in the environment originate from wastewater effluent discharges or from leaking sewers. This new tool will allow engineers to anticipate and control problems associated with wastewater-derived contaminants. Sedlak has over 50 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including the most recent (with H Kim): “Similarities between inorganic sulfide and the strong Hg(II)- complexing ligands in municipal wastewater effluent” in Environmental Science and Technology 39(11).