Environmental Engineering & Toxicology

The 2014 Indo-American Frontiers of Engineering will be held May 19-21, at the Infosys Center in Mysore, India. About 60 outstanding engineers under the age of 45 will meet for an intensive 2-1/2 day symposium to discuss cutting-edge developments in four areas: Biomaterials, Water Resource Management in the Face of Climate Change, Green Approaches to Communications, and Engineering in the Context of Big Data.

From 1996 Switzer Fellow Evan Hansen, whose West Virginia-based firm Downstream Strategies offers environmental consulting services with a core belief in the importance of protecting the environment and linking economic development with natural resource stewardship:

From 2000 Switzer Fellow Jen Osha, who is coordinating an effort to bring bottled water to West Virginia residents whose water supply was contaminated by the chemical leak at Freedom Industries last week:

A team of scientists came to Richmond in 2006 to conduct a new kind of study, one that would try to answer residents' questions of which outdoor pollutants were coming indoors. At 40 homes in Richmond and 10 in nearby Bolinas, which has no heavy industry, equipment monitored pollution levels outdoors and indoors. The results were striking. The outdoor levels around Richmond homes were almost double the levels around Bolinas homes, and the chemicals moved indoors. Vanadium and nickel in outdoors air were among the highest in the state.

Standing ankle deep in black oil in a green field in Nigeria, Donna Vorhees was startled not by the pollutant inching up her boots, but by the two barefoot women inching past her.

Public health advocates cheered when the Environmental Protection Agency approved a stricter standard for arsenic in drinking water in 2001. Arsenic, a naturally occurring element in the earth’s crust, contaminates water supplies when it migrates from rocks into groundwater. Chronic exposure to arsenic in drinking water can cause serious skin and digestive problems and has been linked to several types of cancer.

Natural ecosystems provide essential services for our communities. Forests and wetlands, for example, filter the water we drink, protect neighborhoods from floods and droughts, and shade aquatic habitat for fish populations.