Charisma Acey
Associate Professor and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Food Institute
Department of City and Regional Planning
Research Areas: access to drinking water and sanitation, environmental justice, poverty reduction, food security, collaborative governance and participatory research methods
Sample Projects: Exploring the Human Right to Water Paradigm in Urban and Peri-Urban Governance; Are Water Utility Customers in Kenya Willing to Pay More to Improve Sanitation in Low-Income Communities?; Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria
Jack Colford
Professor of Epidemiology
School of Public Health
Research Areas: Waterborne infectious diseases (domestic, developing country, and recreational water settings), Clinical trial design (individual and community-level)
Sample Projects: Cluster-randomised controlled trials of individual and combined water, sanitation, hygiene and nutritional interventions in rural Bangladesh and Kenya: the WASH Benefits study, Health risks associated with ocean exposure and fecal indicator bacteria following rainstorms: a longitudinal cohort study of surfers in San Diego, California, Spillover Effects of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Interventions on Child Health
Ashok Gadgil
Professor
ENV Program, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Research Areas: Drinking Water Treatment; Technology Innovation; Technology Maturation for Impact
Sample projects: Arsenic remediation of groundwater used for drinking; Advanced technologies for Capacitive Deionization; Low cost effective remediation of excess fluoride from groundwater used for drinking
Arpad Horvath
Professor
Energy, Civil Infrastructure and Climate Engineering and Project Management
Research Areas: Life-cycle environmental and economic assessment of products, processes, and services, particularly answering important questions about civil infrastructure systems and the built environment: transportation systems, water and wastewater systems, biofuels, pavements, buildings, and construction materials.
Sample Projects: Environmental implications of various products, processes and services, in particular, transportation systems, water and wastewater systems, biofuels, pavements, buildings, and construction materials.
Michael Mascarenhas
Associate Professor
Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management
Research Areas: water access and environmental justice; water charity and affordability; Indigenous water rights, human right to water.
Sample Projects: Thirsty for Environmental Justice. Flint, Detroit, and the War over Michigan’s Water. Previous Projects: Where the Waters Divide. Neoliberalism, White Privilege, and Environmental Racism in Canada (Lexington Books, 2015), and New Humanitarianism and the Crisis of Charity: Good Intentions on the Road to Help (Indiana University Press, 2017)
Baoxia Mi
Assistant Professor
Environmental Engineering and Energy, Civil Infrastructure and Climate (ECIC)
Research Areas: Advanced water treatment technology, membrane process, water and wastewater reuse, desalination, environmental nanotechnology, interfacial and transport phenomena
Sample Projects: Graphene-based membranes for water purification; Hybrid membrane systems for enhanced water and energy sustainability; Fundamental understanding of fouling and transport mechanisms in membrane processes
Kara Nelson
Professor
Environmental Engineering
Research Areas: Detection, removal, and inactivation of pathogens in water and sludge; Water reuse; Natural treatment systems; Drinking water and sanitation in developing countries.
Sample Projects: Disinfection of Water by Sunlight; Evaluation of 24×7 versus Intermittent Water Supply in Hubli-Dharwad, India; Tertiary Treatment for Water Reuse; Wastewater Irrigation of Food Crops; and Stormwater Treatment by Bioinfiltration.
Amy Pickering
Assistant Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering & The Blum Center for Developing Economies
Research areas: Water, sanitation, global health
Sample projects: Strategies for scaling up passive chlorination to increase global access to safe water; effects of drinking water chlorination on children’s intestinal flora and resistomes in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Alison E. Post
Associate Professor
Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies
Research areas: Institutions for urban water delivery; politics of water management and distribution, especially in the Global South; private sector participation in water delivery; water intermittency; human right to water.
Sample Projects: Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina: The Politics of Privatized Infrastructure; How Investor Portfolios Shape Regulatory Outcomes: Privatized Infrastructure After Crises; Information and Intermittent Water: An Impact Evaluation in Bangalore, India; Does Codifying the Human Right to Water Change Public Opinion?
Isha Ray
Professor, Energy and Resources Group
Affiliate Faculty, Geography, Institute for South Asia Studies
Research Areas: Water and development; technology and development; common property resources; and social science research methods
Sample Projects: Access to water and sanitation for the rural and urban poor, the role of technology in improving livelihoods, and public perceptions of energy and climate change policies.
Justin V. Remais
Professor
Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health
Research Areas: infectious disease dynamics in changing environments; environmental and social forcing of vector-borne and waterborne infections; urban epidemiology of environmental pathogens; epidemiology of global environmental change
Sample Projects: Analytical methods for estimating the joint climatological-social drivers of water quality and supply in contrasting tropical zones in Ecuador and China (NSF Water, Sustainability and Climate funded); Public health impacts of drought and climate change in California (UCOP MRPI funded); West Nile Virus, cocci and California’s water resources: exploring relationships between transmission, climate, and hydrology (UCOP MRPI funded); and Effects of agricultural expansion and intensification on the ecology and epidemiology of the waterborne parasite that causes schistosomiasis (NIH EEID funded)
David Sedlak
Co-Director of Berkeley Water Center, Malozemoff Professor in Mineral Engineering, Director of Institute for Environmental Science and Engineering (IESE)
Environmental Engineering
Research Areas: Environmental chemistry, water recycling, contaminant fate in receiving waters, natural treatment systems, reinvention of urban water systems
Sample Projects: The Fate of Trace Organic Compounds in Treatment Wetlands, In Situ Chemical Oxidation of Persistent Organic Contaminants