Appendix C
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members
Samuel N. Luoma (Chair) is a research ecologist with the Institute of the Environment, University of California, Davis. Since 2007, he has been emeritus from the U.S. Geological Survey, he was a research associate on the faculty of The Natural History Museum, London, UK (2007–2013), and he was the first lead scientist for the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, California (2000–2003). Dr. Luoma has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, mostly on the fate, bioavailability, and effects of metal and metalloid contaminants in aquatic environments, along with a 2008 textbook, Metal Contamination in Aquatic Environments: Science and Lateral Management. His studies on the environmental implications of mining began in the late 1970s and continue today, including publications on studies in Southwest England and the Clark Fork River, Montana; consulting in South Africa and British Columbia, Canada; and review committees on Sudbury, Canada, and mountain-top mining in the southeastern United States. He has served on seven Science Advisory Board subcommittees for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as well as several committees of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, most recently the Committee on Progress toward Restoring the Everglades: the Fourth Biennial Review (2010–2012). He received his B.S. and M.Sc. in zoology from Montana State University and his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Hawaii.
Robert L. Annear is a senior principal at Geosyntec Consultants and an environmental engineer with more than 20 years of experience in hydrodynamic and water quality modeling. His additional areas of professional expertise are water quality data collection and analyses, climate change impacts analyses, watershed hydrology and pollutant load modeling, sediment transport modeling, and lake limnology and ecology. While at Geosyntec he has had the opportunity to work on projects for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine through the National Cooperative Highway Research Program. He has conducted numerous surface water data and model peer reviews for agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, Washington Department of Ecology, and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Dr. Annear has also served as a reviewer for various water resource and hydrologic journals and has participated in EPA national water quality grant review panels. Dr. Annear received his B.S. in aerospace engineering from Boston University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Portland State University.
William A. Arnold is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the Joseph T. and Rose S. Ling Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo-Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His expertise is in aquatic chemistry, and his research focuses on the fate and transformation of pollutants in natural
and engineered aquatic systems. Specific research areas include studying the kinetics, pathways, and mechanisms of anthropogenic chemical reactions that occur at surfaces or via photochemical processes; detecting analytes in water and sediment matrices; developing new remediation/containment techniques; assessing sources of disinfection byproducts; and using computational chemistry techniques to predict and/or explain experimental observations. Dr. Arnold has published more than 140 peer-reviewed journal articles and co-authored a Water Chemistry textbook. He is an associate editor for Environmental Science and Technology Letters and serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors. He served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Future Options for Management in the Nation’s Subsurface Remediation Effort. Dr. Arnold received a B.S. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.S. in chemical engineering from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the Johns Hopkins University.
Michael T. Brett is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington. Dr. Brett’s main area of scientific expertise is biological limnology, specifically food web ecology, fatty acid trophic transfer, diet estimation, lake biogeochemical modeling, model assessment, mass balance, and eutrophication control. Dr. Brett has completed several studies in the Spokane River basin, including studies on the biological availability of phosphorus in the effluents of advanced phosphorus removal wastewater treatment plants, on the modeled and observed effects of phosphorus loading on the biological limnology and oxygen inventory of Lake Spokane, and on the modeled and observed climate forcing impacts on Lake Spokane and the Spokane River. Dr. Brett currently serves on the Utah Lake Water Quality Study External Science Panel working to find a solution for chronic toxic cyanobacteria blooms in Utah Lake. He received a B.Sc. in fisheries biology at Humboldt State University, an M.Sc. in zoology at the University of Maine, and a Ph.D. in limnology from the Limnological Institute at Uppsala University, Sweden.
James J. Elser (NAS) is the Bierman Professor of Ecology at the University of Montana and since March 2016 has been director of the Flathead Lake Biological Station at Yellow Bay. Trained as a limnologist, Dr. Elser is best known for his role in developing and testing the theory of ecological stoichiometry, the study of the balance of energy and multiple chemical elements in ecological systems. Currently, Dr. Elser’s research focuses most intensively on Flathead Lake as well as mountain lakes of western Montana and western China. Specific studies involve observational and experimental studies at various scales, including laboratory cultures, short-term field experiments, and sustained whole-ecosystem manipulations. He has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a recipient of the G.E. Hutchinson Award of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, the world’s largest scientific association dedicated to aquatic sciences. In 2019, Dr. Elser was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He received a B.S. in biology from the University of Notre Dame, an M.S. in ecology from the University of Tennessee, and a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis.
Scott E. Fendorf is the Huffington Family Professor of Earth Science at Stanford University, the founding chair of the Earth System Science Department, and presently the senior associate dean in the School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Science at Stanford. He is also a senior fellow in Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. Dr. Fendorf is a geochemist focused on soil and water, with a specific interest in the chemical and biological processes controlling the fate of contaminants and nutrients. He has conducted fundamental experiments coupled with fieldwork across the globe to resolve the processes controlling the bioavailability and transport of metal contaminants, and his research has included metal fate and transport in the Coeur d’Alene River and Coeur d’Alene Lake. He was a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committees on Sources of Lead Contamination at or Near Superfund Sites (2016–2017) and on Bioavailability of Contaminants in Soils and Sediments (2000–2001), and he was a member of the National Academies’ National Committee for Soil Science (2009–2012). He received a B.S. in soil science from California Polytechnic State University, an M.S. in soil chemistry from the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D. in soil and environmental chemistry from the University of Delaware.
Alejandro N. Flores is an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Boise State University. His research focuses on understanding mountain watersheds as regional Earth systems where large-scale patterns emerge as a product of interactions between and among biophysical processes and human action. His research synthesizes numerical models of and data characterizing regional climate, ecohydrology, and human, land, and water management activities in order to assess how perturbations propagate across scales and through component systems. At Boise State, Dr. Flores is the principal investigator and director of the LEAF group, which researches the intersection of water, energy, nutrients, policy, and human activity. He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award and an Army Research Office Young Investigator Program award. He is a co-principal investigator on NSF’s Reynolds Creek Critical Zone Observatory. He holds a B.S. and an M.S. in civil and environmental engineering from Colorado State University, and he received his Ph.D. in hydrology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Robert M. Hirsch is a research hydrologist emeritus at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). As a research hydrologist, the focus of his research is on the description and understanding of long-term variability and change in surface water quality and streamflow. From 1994 through May 2008, he served as the chief hydrologist of the USGS. In this capacity, Dr. Hirsch was responsible for all USGS water science programs, which encompass research and monitoring of the nation’s groundwater and surface water resources, including issues of water quantity as well as quality. Dr. Hirsch has received numerous honors from the federal government and from nongovernmental organizations, including the 2006 American Water Resources Association’s William C. Ackermann Medal for Excellence in Water Management and selection to be the Walter Langbein Lecturer of the American Geophysical Union in 2017, and he has twice been conferred the rank of Meritorious Senior Executive by a U.S. President. Dr. Hirsch has served on several National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committees, most recently the Committee to Review the New York City Watershed Protection Program. He received a B.A. in geology from Earlham College, an M.S. in geology from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the Johns Hopkins University.
Lynn E. Katz holds the Hussein M. Alharthy Centennial Chair in Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, serves as the director of the Center for Water and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, and is the associate director of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Frontier Research Center on Materials for Water and Energy Systems. Dr. Katz has more than 25 years of experience examining reaction phenomena at interfaces and evaluating the impact of these processes on the fate and transport of organic and inorganic contaminants in the environment. Her research has involved both fundamental and applied studies in this field and has included the development of insitu remediation and exsitu treatment processes. A major focus of research throughout her career has involved the development and application of surface complexation models for predicting metal ion fate in the environment. This research thrust was the theme of her National Science Foundation Career Award, several DOE research projects, and peer-reviewed publications. She received her B.S.E. in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University. She received M.S. degrees in environmental engineering and chemistry and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, all from the University of Michigan.
James G. Moberly is an associate professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at the University of Idaho. His research focuses on discovering how microorganisms or their bioproducts can be applied to solve engineering and environmental problems, improve human health, and increase accessibility to high-quality water sources. Dr. Moberly has worked on research in the Coeur d’Alene basin during his graduate work and as a faculty member at the University of Idaho. His postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory focused on determination of the biogeochemical factors and bacterial genes or pathways that produce highly toxic methylmercury. In the private sector, he performed contaminated site characterization, remediation, and treatability testing. He holds a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Idaho, an M.S. in chemical engineering from Washington State University, and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Montana State University.
S. Geoffrey Schladow currently serves as the founding director of the University of California, Davis, Tahoe Environmental Research Center, the custodian of the longest continuous multidisciplinary dataset for a large lake in the western United States, and he is also a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis. His disciplinary expertise is in environmental fluid mechanics and their interactions with water quality and ecological processes in aquatic ecosystems, using a combination of field measurements, laboratory measurements, and numerical modeling. He has studied the impacts of climate change, management interventions, and watershed activities on eutrophication, dissolved oxygen distribution, the release of nutrients and heavy metals from lake sediments, and alterations to food webs from invasive species. Dr. Schladow co-chairs the Tahoe Science Advisory Council, serves on the Technical Advisory Committee to the Blue Ribbon Committee for Clear Lake, is a member of the Salton Sea Science Committee, and is the Science Director for Chile Lagos Limpios, a nonprofit measuring and modeling the response of Patagonian lakes to climate change and land use change. He earned his Ph.D. and B.Eng. in civil engineering from the University of Western Australia and his M.Eng. in hydraulic engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
STAFF
Laura J. Ehlers is a senior program officer for the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Since joining the National Academies in 1997, she has served as the study director for more than 27 committees, including the Committee to Review the New York City Watershed Management Strategy, the Committee on Bioavailability of Contaminants in Soils and Sediment, the Committee on Assessment of Water Resources Research, the Committee on Reducing Stormwater Discharge Contributions to Water Pollution, the Committee to Review EPA’s Economic Analysis of Final Water Quality Standards for Nutrients for Lakes and Flowing Waters in Florida, and the Committee on Management of Legionella in Water Systems. Dr. Ehlers has periodically consulted for the EPA’s Office of Research Development regarding its water quality research programs. She received her B.S. from the California Institute of Technology, majoring in biology and engineering and applied science. She earned both an M.S.E. and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering at the Johns Hopkins University.
Rachel Silvern is a program officer with the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Polar Research Board at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where she has led projects on developing a framework for evaluating greenhouse gas information and machine learning and artificial intelligence to advance Earth system science. Prior to joining the National Academies, Dr. Silvern served as a California Council on Science and Technology Science Fellow, where she worked for the California State Assembly, analyzing and staffing legislation on drinking water, hazardous waste, and climate adaptation. Dr. Silvern earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard University, where she studied U.S. air quality, and a B.A. in environmental science from Barnard College.
