(4en) Using Geospatial Analysis to Assess Presumptive PFAS Contamination Sites and Develop Tools to Respond to Federal Regulations

Inadequate access to safe drinking water and sanitation continues to pose serious health risks for humankind around the world. Clean water is vital for generating energy, growing food, and sustaining life itself. As demands on limited water resources continue to increase, engineers must create efficient new systems for water treatment, distribution, reuse, and recovery. In fact, the sustainable supply of water was identified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) as one of the critical challenges we must address in their report "Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Addressing Grand Challenges”. As such, guaranteeing clean water and developing better wastewater management strategies are critical to sustain societies and reduce environmental health burdens.

Research Interests: The goal of my research program is to design and implement hazard management, water treatment technologies, and water reuse strategies to address complex environmental challenges through an equity and environmental justice lens. My experience designing and fabricating innovative sustainable remediation technologies and waste management strategies, understanding of life-cycle analysis, and knowledge of computational tools to investigate environmental processes and pollutant exposure risks, combined with my passion for environmental health justice and humanitarian engineering, has provided me with broad foundational knowledge to identify environmental engineering prevention and intervention strategies to address emerging contaminants in the environment in a more just, inclusive, and equitable manner.

My future research focuses on:

1. Identifying geographical areas with a high probability of hazard exposure to monitor for occurrence, fate, transport, and temporal variations of emerging contaminants to further the understanding of the environmental exposome.
2. Design and implement sustainable approaches to reduce health burdens through engineering interventions with a particular focus on hazard management, water treatment technologies, and water reuse strategies.
3. Leverage existing knowledge to build community resilience and foster informed decision-making to improve the well-being of marginalized and/or disadvantaged communities across the commonwealth and the world.

My short-term goals for these projects are: (1) Identify areas in the state with high occurrence of emerging contaminants using GIS modeling and select monitoring locations, (2) Collect water samples at these locations and conduct nontargeted analysis to determine contaminant distribution and elucidate their degradation and biotransformation products, and (3) Identify and implement a water remediation strategy best suited for the selected sampling area. In the long-term, I will work to expand the knowledge generated through these case-specific applications to develop a guiding framework to select sustainable short- and long-term water remediation strategies centered on multidirectional informational exchanges among all stakeholders, as well as translating these findings into hazard management decisions that foster sustainable development and environmental justice. To achieve these goals, I will apply for funding support through NIH and NSF, as well as water research grants through EPA. After my early research is completed, I will be a qualified candidate to apply for the NIH Independent Research Scientist Development Award (K02) through NIEH and the EPSCOR Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) Track-4: EPSCoR Research Fellows Award.

My research experience on the development of polymeric and magnetic micro and nanocomposite materials as low-cost, sustainable, and reusable technologies for water and wastewater treatment, development of catalytic degradation approaches for emerging contaminants that result in zero-waste, understanding the fate and transport analysis of contaminants in the aquatic environment, and knowledge of computational tools (e.g., GIS) to investigate environmental processes, identify industrial point sources, and determine exposure risks for surrounding communities, have built a solid foundation to establish a nationally recognized research program. In addition, my entrepreneurial experiences have further accelerated my problem-solving ability, strategizing future research directions and securing government funding for technology transfer initiatives. Leveraging my research skillset and collaborations with government agencies, universities, and industry partnerships, I intend to apply for seed grants, such as those available through KY NSF EPSCOR research awards and federal funding from the NIH for my translational work (water treatment technologies, hazard management strategies aimed at reducing contamination at industrial point sources) and from the NSF for my fundamental science research (environmental fate, transport, and remediation of emerging contaminants). I will initially focus on the NIH Independent Research Scientist Development Award (K02) and the NSF CAREER award.

I am currently a Research Engineer III and the Director of the Sustainability and Analytics Equipment Facility (SAEF) in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Kentucky. In this position, I work with researchers across the College of Engineering and graduate and undergraduate students to provide analytical expertise, collaborate on grant writing proposals, and co-mentor graduate students' thesis projects. I am also the principal investigator of the Biomonitoring and Environmental Analytical Chemistry Core (BEACC) of the University of Kentucky Superfund Research Program Nutrition and Superfund Chemical Toxicity (NIH P42) and of an NIH R13 Conference planning grant to organize the 2024 Central and Eastern European Conference on Environmental Health (CEECHE) to be held in Thessaloniki, Greece from July 15-19. I have also served as the PI of an NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) phase I grant on flocculant technologies for water treatment, which resulted in an SBIR phase II application to further and scale up the flocculant development, recently funded for 2 additional years.

Teaching Experience: I have been fortunate to gain expertise in various teaching experiences, including traditional classroom lecturing, project advising, and laboratory training for undergraduate and graduate students. As the Director of SAEF, I play a vital role in expanding students' analytical chemistry knowledge, honing best practices for experimental design, and developing responsible conduct of research across all their disciplines. I am committed to teaching and mentoring students, as evidenced by mentees' successes in winning national poster/paper competitions, publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals, and pursuing master's and doctoral programs. Most undergraduate students that I have mentored in the laboratory (8 out of 10) have been either females or minorities. I have been pleased to serve as a role model for them as Hispanic females in engineering. Furthermore, I have always taken the time to go above and beyond my teaching responsibilities to ensure that none of my students are left behind because they struggle with the subject matter.

CE 533: Railroad Facilities Design and Analysis (Co-Instructor)

CE 599: Engineering and Environmental Health (Co-Instructor)

CME 599/780: Bionanotechnology: Interfaces and Devices (Invited Lecturer )

Graduate Teaching Assistant of CME 425: Heat and Mass Transfer, CME 320: Engineering Thermodynamics, CME 330: Fluid Mechanics

Teaching Interests: The interdisciplinary nature of my career, and my focus on water and wastewater engineering, positions me well to teach a wide range of courses in the chemical engineering and civil engineering curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Some of those courses include Introduction to fluid Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, Process Principles, Separation Processes, Heat and Mas Transfer, Fundamentals and Applications of Sustainable Engineering, Introduction to Environmental Engineering, Water Resources Engineering, Water and Wastewater Treatment Engineering, Biological Processes for Water Quality Control, and Water Quality in Surface Waters.

I am interested in developing a course that focuses on the sustainability of current and emerging water treatment technologies regarding their economic, social, and environmental cost when they are first applied as well as the unforeseen benefits or consequences of their prolonged use. The course would introduce undergraduate and graduate students to traditional and emerging water treatment technologies and their applications, demonstrate how to conduct life cycle analysis, and evaluate resilience and sustainability aspects of these technologies. Additionally, I would also be interested in developing courses as special topics on: fate and transport of emerging contaminants, membrane technologies, introduction to the environmental exposome, and Introduction to bionanotechnology.