Avner Vengosh, Duke University, North Carolina
Avner Vengosh completed his PhD in Environmental Geochemistry in 1990 from the Australian National University. Since 2005 he is a Professor of Geochemistry and Water Quality at Duke University Nicholas School of Environment. Professor Vengosh also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Duke Global Health Institute. He has served as the Associate Editor for the international journals Water Resources Research and Applied Geochemistry, and since 2015 a member of the editorial board of Environmental Science and Technology. In 2011 he received the International Association of Geochemistry (IAGC) Fellow award. In 2015 he was elected as the Geological Society of America Fellow. Two of his recent papers received the Best Science Paper Award for the journal Environmental Science and Technology. In 2016 he received the ES&T Excellence in Review Award. In 2017, he was selected by the American Chemical Society among the highly prolific authors for Environmental Science and Technology Letters. Dr. Vengosh has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles, several of them in the top journals in the field, including the Proceeding National Academy of Science in the USA (PNAS), Environmental Science and Technology, and Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Environmental Science and Technology Letters, among others. Professor Vengosh research team has been engaged in studying water quality issues in numerous sites around the world related to salinization and contamination of water resources with special emphasis on naturally occurring radioactive elements, arsenic, selenium, fluoride, boron, uranium, and hexavalent chromium. Vengosh’s team has developed and utilized geochemical and isotope tracers to delineate the sources and reconstruct the pathways of water contamination. Since 2009, he has also been engaged in research of the water-energy nexus and has pioneered several research projects and on unconventional oil and gas development and hydraulic fracturing, coal mining, and coal ash disposal.
Email: vengosh@duke.edu. Group Web site: https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/avnervengosh/
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Erika Weinthal, Duke University, North Carolina
Erika Weinthal specializes in global environmental politics and environmental security with a particular emphasis on water and energy. Current areas of research include (1) global environmental politics and governance, (2) environmental conflict and peacebuilding, (3) the political economy of the resource curse, and (4) climate change adaptation. Dr. Weinthal’s research spans multiple geographic regions, including the Soviet successor states, the Middle East, South Asia, East Africa, and North America. Dr. Weinthal is author of State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic Politics and International Politics in Central Asia (MIT Press 2002), which received the 2003 Chadwick Alger Prize and the 2003 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize. She has co-authored, Oil is not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States (Cambridge University Press 2010) and has co-edited, Water and Post-conflict Peacebuilding: Shoring Up Peace (Routledge/Earthscan Press, 2014). She is a member of the UNEP Expert Group on Conflict and Peacebuilding. Dr. Weinthal is also an Editor at Global Environmental Politics. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Women Peacebuilders for Water Award under the auspices of “Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015”.
Email: weinthal@duke.edu. Web site: https://nicholas.duke.edu/people/faculty/weinthal
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Elisabetta Lambertini
Elisabetta Lambertini is a public health research engineer specializing in pathogen risk assessment and mitigation in water and food systems. With a background in environmental engineering, Dr. Lambertini has more than 10 years of combined expertise in microbial water quality, food safety, risk models, predictive microbiology, food processing and municipal water engineering, and infectious disease ecology. Her current research interests include fate and transport of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and virulence genetic elements in food growing and processing environments, AMR mitigation in animal agriculture, spatially-explicit models of pathogen transport and risk, and resilience in water and sanitation health (WASH) and food safety infrastructure. She has led research projects focused on the ecology of E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, as well as viral and protozoan water- and food-borne pathogens, developed farm-to-fork and ingredient-to-consumer risk models to assess health risks in complex food supply chains, and led predictive microbiology studies of bacterial dynamics. Prior to joining RTI, she served as a research faculty at the University of Maryland, and was a postdoctoral researcher in food science and technology at the University of California – Davis.
Email: elambertini@rti.org Web site: https://www.rti.org/expert/elisabetta-lambertini
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Jennifer H. Redmon is an expert in environmental health science and chemical risk assessment who leads complex projects involving the protection of human health and the environment. With a background in both the scientific and policy areas of environmental and natural resource management, she offers a blend of practical field expertise, technical knowledge, managerial skills, and a commitment to improving public health. She understands the potential environmental health impacts associated with chemical contaminants and toxins, and has a concrete understanding of federal and state environmental statutes and regulations. She is interested in linking the presence of chemicals and toxins in the environment with exposures, supporting risk mitigation measures that improve environmental health outcomes, and improving global sustainability and natural resource management in the food-energy-water nexus. Her strong interdisciplinary background enables her to lead technical projects spanning issues such as water quality, noncommunicable diseases, waste management, beneficial reuse of industrial materials, enterprise risk management, and chemical food safety. Ms. Redmon has managed a broad variety of site-specific, regional, national and international projects related to environmental health, site assessment, risk assessment, and risk management for private clients, national and international non-governmental organizations, and state and federal government agencies. She has subject matter knowledge in chemical toxicity, hazard assessment, fate and transport, exposure science, the development and use of semi-quantitative and quantitative risk tools and models, and data evaluation. She has managed or served as the technical lead on numerous projects encompassing site-specific and national scale risk assessments, risk ranking, risk prioritization, enterprise risk management, risk-based decision analysis, multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), beneficial reuse, regulatory rulemaking support, and state-of-the-science reviews. For example, Ms. Redmon managed a probabilistic national- and regional-level multimedia, multipathway human and ecological assessment that served as the basis for the federal coal ash waste management rule. Ms. Redmon also has specialized experience in water quality evaluations and risk management for threatened or contaminated drinking water supplies, wellhead protection, vapor intrusion, comingled plume delineation, contaminant trend analysis, and limnologic assessments. She has overseen site-specific environmental investigation, monitoring, remediation, and management projects with multimedia chemical and radiological contamination in groundwater, surface water, soil, sediment, and air. She also serves as a third-party reviewer for environmental audits, financial assurance reviews, and expert litigation. Her current focus areas include identifying risk factors associated with chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (CKDu), characterizing the use of oilfield produced water for crop irrigation, and providing technical and decision support for child care centers to identify and mitigate lead detected in drinking water.
Email: jredmon@rti.org Web site: https://www.rti.org/expert/jennifer-hoponick-redmon
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Laura Feinstein, Pacific Institute, California
Laura Feinstein joined the Water Program at the Pacific Institute in 2016. Laura conducts research on aquatic ecosystems; the impacts of climate change on water resources, water-energy nexus; and environmental health and justice. Prior to joining the Pacific Institute, she was a research scientist and project manager with the California Council on Science and Technology. She also served as a Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the California Senate Committee on Environmental Quality and was a California SeaGrant Delta Science Fellow. Laura holds a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis.
Email: lfeinstein@pacinst.org, web site: http://pacinst.org/about-us/staff-and-board/laura-feinstein/
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Luis Edgar Cabrales Arriaga, California State University at Bakersfield, California
Luis Edgar Cabrales Arriaga received a BS in Chemical Engineering at the IEST in Altamira, Mexico. He gained experience working as an engineer at M&G Polymers. Afterwards, he went on to earn an MS in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. with specialization in Fibers and Biopolymers from Texas Tech University (TTU). Later, he joined the Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute (FBRI) at TTU as a research associate. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Department of Physics and Engineering at California State University, Bakersfield. At CSU Bakersfield, he continues to work on research related to materials engineering and water treatment technologies. He has obtained federal and state funded grants to work on innovative technologies to reuse produced water for agricultural purposes.
Email: lcabrales@csub.edu. Web site: http://www.csub.edu/~lcabrales/