News & Awards
Below is a collection of accomplishments by OSU water faculty and students. These items are also posted in H2OSU, the weekly campus water newsletter. To add to this list, please email iww@oregonstate.edu.
The Institute for Water and Watersheds and the OSU Department of Geosciences are pleased to welcome Dr. Richard A. Meganck to OSU as an International Program Leader for the IWW. While at OSU, Dr. Maganck is on assignment with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management (UNESCO-ICIWaRM). Dr. Maganck brings a wealth of knowledge in international development and water resources education to OSU. From 2003 until 2009 he was rector and professor of the United Nations Institute for Water Education, UNESCO-IHE in the Netherlands. Dr. Maganck’s career also includes dozens of natural resources and economic development missions to more than 100 countries around the world. Dr. Maganck received his PhD from OSU in 1974. Please welcome Dr. Maganck to OSU at a brown-bag luncheon on Friday, May 6, noon – 1 pm, Wilkinson 203. RSVP to Todd Jarvis for lunch.
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Jay Zarnetske, a PhD candidate in Water Resources Science, is a recipient of the 2011-2013 Gaylord Donnelley Environmental Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University. He will be working with Dr. Peter Raymond and Dr. James Saiers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. His proposal was titled "Flow regime controls on river nitrogen and carbon export under past, present, and future climate conditions". Jay is completing his PhD in Water Resources Science with committee members Roy Haggerty (chair), Steven Wondzell, Stanley Gregory, Vrushali Bokil. Read more about Jay and his research on his website.
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The spring seminar series features a line up of terrific speakers including Dennis Lettenmaier, Robert Hirsch, LeRoy Poff and others. Download the seminar poster for the complete schedule. The series is sponsored by the Institute for Water and Watersheds, the USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, the Water Resources Graduate Program and Hydrologic Engineering, Inc. Video recordings of each seminar will be available online about a week after each seminar. Links will be posted on the IWW website and available through OSU Media Manager.
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Kara DiFrancesco, a PhD student in Water Resources Engineering , was awarded a fellowship from the National Science Foundation's East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) program. Kara will be working with The Nature Conservancy and affiliates on evaluating the flexibility of flood management systems in the Yangtze River basin. Kara's thesis advisor is Desiree Tullos.
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Oregon State University conducted an "International Undergraduate Field Hydrology" course in the environs of Chillán, Chile between January 2nd - 15th, 2011. The course was led by OSU's Dr. John Selker, with additional instruction by OSU research scientists Dr. Majdi Abou Najm, Dr. David Rupp, and Mr. Ryan Stewart. Local expertise was also be provided by Dr. Hamil Uribe, a hydrologist at the Instituto de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (INIA), and Dr. José Luís Arumí, a professor at the Universidad de Concepción, Chillán. This course was funded by a CUAHSI HydroGeoPhysics Travel Grant and the Hydrologic Sciences Program (NSF) to advance both undergraduate education and the scientific mission of OSU's Chilean project.
16 students - including representatives from Germany, Chile, and from universities across the US - participated in the Dr. Selker's course.
The students all directly participated in geophysical field methods based on observation of seismic resonance, electrical resistivity, and electromagnetic conductivity during the course of several infiltration and evapotranspiration experiments. In addition, the geophysical data acquired during the course significantly advanced our understanding of the site and the underlying hydrologic processes.
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Dr. Arturo Leon is a new Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University in the area of Water Resources Engineering. Arturo is originally from Peru, where He earned his B.S in Civil Engineering and his M.S. in Hydraulic Engineering. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2007. His areas of research include Real-time control of complex hydraulic systems, transient flows, and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and physical modeling of hydraulic structures. Arturo has developed various mathematical and numerical models, among them the open source code Illinois Transient Model (ITM), the Illinois Hydraulic Conveyance Analysis Program (ICAP), the Street Flooding Model (SFM) and the River Simulation and Optimization Couple Model (RSOCM). The RSOCM model is intended for the intelligent control of complex regulated river systems, such as those that have multiple reservoirs, have multiple objectives and in which the flow dynamics of the system is of particular interest. Read more about Arturo on his website.
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Oregon State University's student chapter of Engineers Without Borders was awarded a $2000 "Outstanding Chapter Award" at the West Coast Regional Workshop this October, for their ingenuity and contribution to local water catchment systems in rural communities in El Salvador and Kenya. EWB strives to improve the lives of others worldwide by using sustainable engineering and appropriate technology to promote community ownership and development in rural communities.
Read more about the chapter on their website.
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The IWW is pleased to welcome Dr. Martin Schroth, Professor of Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich, to the OSU campus as an IWW visiting fellow. Dr. Schroth specializes in the development and application of novel methods for the assessment of microbial processes at the field scale. His current research activities focus on the quantification of microbial
processes involved in greenhouse-gas turnover in soils, with particular emphasis on microbially mediated methane oxidation.
Dr. Schroth is working with Professor John Selker and team on distributed temperature sensing using fiber-optic cables to obtain high resolution wind-speed and soil-moisture data for various environmental
applications.
Dr. Schroth will present a public seminar on Tuesday November 30, 4-5 p.m. on Microbial Methane Oxidation in Terrestrial Systems.
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Jennifer Holderman will be OSU’s first graduate of the concurrent JD-MS in Water Resources, a program possible through a partnership with University of Oregon’s law school. Congratulations, Jennifer! Read about her on page 16 of the UO Environmental and Natural Resources Law newsletter.
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Dr. Tim Burt is Master of Hatfield College and Professor of Geography at Durham University, UK. He has been researching aspects of hydrology, geomorphology and climate change since the mid-1970s. While at OSU he will be working with Professor Jeff McDonnell on a range of topics including the analysis of long-term hydrological data from the H J Andrews watersheds and a textbook on hillslope hydrology. He also hopes to complete analysis of some long (many decades) records of nitrate concentrations in English rivers and his compilation of daily rainfall data from the 1820s for the Radcliffe Observatory at Oxford University, possibly the longest such record in existence.
Please come and meet Dr. Burt when he gives a seminar on Friday, October 29. The seminar is titled Long-term monitoring of nitrate - implications for science, policy and management .
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