Coordinators▼ Special section: the world’s water Julie Beth Zimmerman, an assistant professor at Yale University, served as the principal coordinator for this special focus issue on world water issues. She proposed the issue, served as the first point of contact for all the papers, coordinated reviews, and personally edited several manuscripts. Zimmerman holds joint appointJulie Beth Zimmerman ments at Yale in the chemical engineering department, the environmental engineering program, and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She is also a visiting professor in the department of civil engineering at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include green engineering, environmentally benign design and manufacturing, the fate and impacts of anthropogenic compounds in the environment, and appropriate water treatment technologies for developing regions. Research projects include the study of plant-based coagulants for point-of-use water treatment in developing communities, impediments to implementing green chemistry and engineering in the U.S. chemical industry, and green nanotechnology. Zimmerman serves as assistant director for research at Yale’s Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering. She previously served as an engineer and a program coordinator in the Office of Research and Development at the U.S. EPA. In 2008, she became the lead investigator of a project that received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The project is bringing together researchers from Yale and Michigan Technological University to examine issues of water quality, quantity, and availability in the Great Lakes under several future scenarios, such as climate change, to support allocation and pricing decisions for sustainable water use in the area’s basin. James R. Mihelcic is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan Technological University (MTU). He co-directs MTU’s Sustainable Futures Institute, which was established in 2003 as a teaching, research, and outreach institution dedicated to the field of sustainable systems. He also directs the Master’s James R. Mihelcic International Program in Civil and Environmental Engineering, a unique program that allows graduate students to combine graduate coursework and research with a 2-year engineering assignment with the Peace Corps. In addition, he teaches at Southern University and A&M College (in Baton Rouge, La.) as an adjunct graduate faculty member. Mihelcic’s research interests include the chemical and biological processes that control the fate and treat© 2008 American Chemical Society
ment of pollutants in natural and engineered systems, industrial ecology, sustainability, pollution prevention, environmental risk, and engineering water and sanitation projects that incorporate appropriate technology in developing regions. He currently is advising five doctoral students who are working on issues of how global change (e.g., climate, population, urbanization) impacts water availability and quality. Mihelcic serves as president-elect of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) and was awarded the AEESP–Wiley Interscience Award for Outstanding Contributions to Environmental Engineering and Science Education in 2002. He is lead author of the textbook Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering and has published several articles about sustainability and issues of international water and sanitation over the past few years. James Smith is a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he teaches environmental chemistry, groundwater flow, and solute transport. His research interests include the fate and transport of emerging environmental pollutants and new solutions for groundwater remediation by James Smith bacteria and plants. During the 2004–2005 academic year, Smith was named Princeton University’s William R. Kenan, Jr., Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching. As a professor at UVA, he has helped establish the Program of Interdisciplinary Research in Contaminant Hydrogeology, an interdisciplinary graduate research and education program to train scientists and engineers in the fields of hydrogeology, geochemistry, microbial ecology, and environmental engineering. In addition to teaching graduate and undergraduate students about water supply and treatment in developing communities, Smith and his students have developed point-of-use water treatment technologies in the laboratory and tested them in Guatemala and Mexico. As part of that work, Smith and his graduate student Vinka Oyanedel-Craver recently published the first rigorous assessment of the success of nanosilver used in ceramic water filters for point-of-use treatment for drinking water (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2008, 42, 927–933). In addition, Smith and his lab group evaluated natural plant coagulants from the Opuntia species of cactus to treat household water. They will be testing the approach in Guatemala and Mexico. Other research projects include looking for statin compounds in wastewater treatment plants to document the fate and transport of the cholesterol-lowering medication. June 15, 2008 / Environmental Science & Technology ■ 4237
