Drinking Water and Infrastructure

Solving today’s complex environmental challenges is a daunting task. It requires the delicate balancing of many competing factors, from cost and convenience to public health protection and resource allocation. At ERG, I am fortunate to be able to work on projects that get to the core of this balance, surrounded by clients and colleagues who are equally passionate about finding mindful, objective solutions for our complex world.

I feel fortunate to work with so many dedicated researchers at EPA and other agencies on remediating contaminated water sources, adapting to climate change, and providing decision-support in related areas. While my particular expertise is groundwater, I’ve had the opportunity to lead projects in urban planning, coral reefs, climate change resilience, emergency response, stormwater, modeling, and more. Multi-disciplinary approaches are helpful for tackling all these issues, and I’m always learning.

Increasingly, organizations are applying life cycle assessment to learn how they can most effectively reduce the environmental footprint of their products and processes. I take great pride in contributing to techniques and open-source databases that help move the science of LCA forward and facilitate access to more robust, current, and regionalized public life cycle inventory data.

I believe that everyone is entitled to safe, reliable, and affordable drinking water.

I have dedicated my career to helping clients develop practical, incremental solutions to environmental challenges that can sometimes feel overwhelming. It is a privilege to work with colleagues and clients who are devoted to building a better world, on the foundations of science, information, and communication.

As an environmental engineer living in Montana, I’m keenly aware of the value of preserving our nation’s natural resources and of my own part in helping to prevent the degradation of these irreplaceable assets. I work to ensure that wastewater is managed properly and that the water we drink is clean now and into the future.

Through my experience operating water systems, I have come to appreciate how dedicated utility staff are to ensuring that communities have safe drinking water. Whether I’m providing technical assistance or conducting a compliance inspection that may call out an issue, I have great respect for all who strive to protect human health under whatever site-specific challenges they may be working with.

The operation and maintenance of water and wastewater utilities requires a clear understanding of the diverse variables unique to each facility. I enjoy interfacing with utilities operations and management teams to evaluate these variables and help create conditions or approaches that enable water treatment and management systems to perform at their highest efficiencies.

Staring out of an airplane window not long after my first geology course, I was amazed at how the landscape features jumped out at me. I saw clearly how river flow, sediment, and time had interacted. That wonder is still with me as I apply what I know about geology and geochemistry to protect our nation’s groundwater, drinking water, and infrastructure. My work is diverse, and I like it that way because it allows me to bring a deep understanding of the earth and environmental sciences to a wide array of subsurface and surface environmental problems.