Water and International Development
Research
Students can pursue a diverse range of research activities within the WAID program. Some areas of emphasis include:
- Interaction of water and infectious diseases like malaria and dengue fever and strategies to forecast and manage outbreaks of those diseases
- Improvement of field methods for bacteriological and chemical evaluation of water quality
- Development and evaluation of innovative and low-cost methods for water treatment, gray water reuse, and wastewater disposal
- Evaluation of methods to upgrade existing water and wastewater infrastructure
- Determining a suitable technology/method to measure or estimate daily to seasonal crop water needs for specific situations in developing countries
- Adaptation of crop water stress monitoring techniques to manage irrigation water under a limited to full irrigation regime
- Institutional approaches to resolve inequities in water allocation and management
- Infrastructure management for water, wastewater, and energy pipeline systems
- Successful application of geographical information systems (GIS) in developing countries
- Application of GIS for achieving socio-economic progress
- Improving productivity of irrigated agriculture through efficient water management
- Developing efficient and modern water control and measurement in gravity flow irrigation systems
- Biological process engineering
- Conversion of waste to energy
- Integrated urban water management
- Integrated waste and wastewater management for rural and urban communities
- Watershed management, nonpoint source pollution, and river science and engineering
- Groundwater quantity estimation for small-island aquifers in the Pacific and Indian Oceans under varying climate scenarios
- Rain catchment storage estimation and optimization for small-island communities
- Evaluation of methods to manage potable water supplies for small-island communities
- Evaluation of methods to remediate contaminated groundwater within small-island aquifer systems
