Water and Environmental Engineering Seminar: Spring 2026
The Water and Environmental Engineering Seminar will feature guest speakers from industry, academia, and research centers, as well as students and faculty in the CEE department. The seminar series aims to cover a broad range of topics related to water and environmental engineering.
Students can enroll in CIVE 570 for one hour of credit. The campus and community are welcome to attend.
Course Details
All lectures are held on campus on Wednesdays at 4:00 p.m. in Scott 229.
For off-campus participants unable to attend in-person, you can request a unique Teams link for each session.
The mining industry plays a critical role in supplying the raw materials essential to modern society and the global energy transition. However, the management of tailings, the byproduct of mineral extraction, remains one of the industry’s most complex environmental, social, and technical challenges. Conventional tailings management practices have raised concerns related to long-term stability, water use, environmental protection, and social acceptance, underscoring the need for continued innovation and improvement in tailings design, operation, and closure.
This seminar will provide an overview of tailings management in contemporary mining practice, highlighting both established approaches and emerging technologies aimed at reducing risk and environmental footprint while supporting responsible resource development. Topics will include the fundamentals of tailings generation and storage, key geotechnical and environmental considerations, and the central role of civil and environmental engineers in the planning, design, and long-term stewardship of tailings facilities. Current challenges, such as long-term stability, climate variability, and legacy facility management, will be discussed alongside examples of innovative technologies and strategies being developed to address these issues. Collectively, these efforts are critical to minimizing the impacts of mining while ensuring a reliable supply of minerals necessary for the global economy.
Dr. Scalia is a geoenvironmental engineer and Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU), and the CSU Site Director for the Tailings Center. He is also the co-chair of Tailings and Mine Waste 2026 in Denver, Colorado. His research focuses on applied and translational research in the areas of tailings and mine waste, groundwater stewardship, and unsaturated soils. He is an associate editor for the Journal of Geotechnical & Geoenvironmental Engineering and Geotextiles & Geomembranes, as well as an editorial board member of Canadian Geotechnical Journal and Geosynthetics International. Prior to joining CSU, Dr. Scalia was a Senior Associate in the Environmental and Earth Sciences Practice at Exponent in Seattle and Boston.
Flood research has traditionally approached inundation events as isolated hydrological phenomena driven by meteorological forcing and topographic constraints. This talk proposes a paradigm shift in how we conceptualize, study, and model floods through three interconnected perspectives. First, I present a framework for understanding floods as living organisms—dynamic entities with birth, growth, migration, and decay phases that interact with their environment, exhibit adaptive behaviors, and leave lasting ecological and social legacies. This organismal perspective reveals emergent properties often overlooked in conventional hazard-focused approaches. Second, through a systematic review of five decades of flood research (1970s–2020s), I trace the evolution from purely hydraulic modeling to coupled human-natural systems approaches, identifying critical inflection points in our understanding and persistent gaps that continue to limit predictive capability and societal resilience. The review highlights a shift from flood control to flood risk management, and more recently, toward holistic frameworks like FACED (Flood-Agriculture-Climate-Ecology-Disease) that recognize cascading impacts across interconnected systems. Finally, I propose a vision for the future of flood modeling centered on foundation models—scalable AI architectures pre-trained on diverse Earth observation data that can be fine-tuned for regional applications. Drawing parallels to breakthroughs in natural language processing and computer vision, I discuss how flood foundation models could democratize advanced forecasting capabilities, improve predictions in data-scarce regions, and enable real-time integration of multiple information streams. Together, these perspectives call for reconceptualizing floods not as engineering problems to be solved, but as complex adaptive systems requiring transdisciplinary approaches that bridge physical modeling, artificial intelligence, and community knowledge.
Dr. Zhi Li is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering department. He leads the Flood Lab, where his research advances scientific understanding and practical adaptation strategies for floods through remote sensing, hydrologic-hydraulic modeling, and artificial intelligence.
Dr. Li earned his Ph.D. in Hydrology and Water Security from the University of Oklahoma (2022), M.S. from the National University of Singapore and Delft University of Technology (2019). He served as a Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow from 2023-2025.
His research examines flood impacts through the FACED framework (Flood-Agriculture-Climate-Ecology-Disease), addressing critical questions about climate change effects on flood frequency, severity, and societal impacts. Notable work includes pioneering studies on flash flood metrics, documenting how severe floods reduce global rice yields, and developing the AQUAH system—the first end-to-end language-based agent for hydrology. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles and serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. His work emphasizes climate justice, particularly for tribal communities and vulnerable populations.
Advancing sustainable and resilient water systems requires applied research environments that bridge fundamental science, technology development, and real-world implementation. This seminar will highlight ongoing research at the Water Technology Acceleration Platform (Water TAP), a plug-and-play, pilot-scale testbed located at the CSU Spur campus, designed to accelerate next-generation water treatment, reuse, and monitoring technologies. Research efforts at Water TAP focus on fit-for-purpose water across diverse source waters, including graywater, stormwater, rainwater, and industrial water sources available onsite. Fit-for-purpose water systems collect water from local sources and treat those water sources to a quality appropriate for the end use, ensuring the “right water for the right use”. A defining feature of Water TAP is its close integration with utilities, industry partners, and public agencies, which enables research questions to be grounded in real operational challenges while preserving academic independence. These partnerships ensure research questions are grounded in operational realities while creating opportunities for student engagement through theses, senior design projects, internships, and applied research roles. The Water TAP has developed several outfacing collaborative projects with industry and utility partners
The seminar will introduce Water TAP as a research resource for students and faculty, illustrate representative ongoing projects, and explore how collaborative, real-world testbeds can advance both fundamental understanding and practical solutions in water and environmental engineering.
Dr. Sybil Sharvelle is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and is a member of the Environmental Engineering focus area. Her research interests include water reuse, integrated urban water management, and waste conversion to energy. Her doctoral work included development of a system for treatment of graywater for potable reuse during space missions. This project led to her current interest in fit-for-purpose water systems, in which she has led projects funded by the Water Research Foundation, USEPA and National Science Foundation. Dr. Sharvelle was a member of the National Research Council Committee for Beneficial Use of Graywater and Stormwater and chaired the NWRI panel for Decentralized Non-Potable Water Systems.
Sharvelle is a founding member of the One Water Solutions Institute (OWSI) at Colorado State University and is the Technical Director of the CSU Spur Campus Water Technology Accelerator Platform, a cutting-edge facility for testing water treatment technologies on different water sources to study the best ways we can clean and reuse water.
Strategic Focus Areas:
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) represent one of the most pressing challenges in environmental remediation due to their extreme persistence, mobility, and resistance to conventional treatment processes. Addressing PFAS contamination requires a combination of effective removal, destructive treatment, and field-deployable remediation strategies.
This presentation provides an overview of PFAS and where they occur, current advances in PFAS degradation and treatment, with a focus on bridging laboratory innovation and real-world implementation. Key destructive technologies will be discussed, including advanced oxidation and reduction processes, adsorptive remediation, and emerging approaches. Particular emphasis will be placed on the understanding of PFAS transformation, treatment performance, and the formation of transformation products.
In parallel, the role of adsorption-based technologies as both stand-alone and coupled treatment solutions will be examined, including the use of activated carbon and modified sorbent materials in in-situ and ex-situ configurations. Field applications will be highlighted through pilot- and full-scale case studies, demonstrating design considerations, injection strategies, longevity, and performance monitoring of sorptive remediation barriers.
The presentation closes with practical field applications, discussing achievements as well as unexpected challenges and key lessons learned.
Dr. Sarah Suehnholz is an environmental chemist specializing in the fate, degradation, and remediation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). She completed her PhD in chemistry in Germany, where her research focused primarily on PFAS destruction and treatment technologies. Her work investigated degradation pathways, adsorption processes, and the transformation behavior of PFAS under engineered treatment conditions, providing mechanistic insight into PFAS breakdown and by-product formation.
Building on this foundation, her current research as a Post-Doc at Colorado School of Mines places a stronger emphasis on advanced analytical chemistry and environmental forensics. She develops and applies targeted and non-target mass spectrometric workflows to characterize PFAS occurrence, transformation products, and treatment performance in laboratory and field systems. Her work integrates high-resolution analytics with applied remediation strategies, including adsorption-based barriers and in-situ treatment approaches, bridging destructive technologies with real-world field implementation.
Hydraulics projects are never simple, requiring practitioners to harness both their creative and technical capabilities to solve important problems for public and private infrastructure. In addition to technical challenges, most hydraulics projects must consider environmental variability, permitting influences, public risk, and social/culture influences. This presentation will highlight several project examples that required design teams to work together through unique circumstances to develop practical and implementable solutions for work within the dams, stormwater, stream restoration and flood risk management areas.
Bryan Heiner
Bryan joined Barr in 2025; he has more than 15 years of experience in research-based roles at industry- leading hydraulics laboratories. He develops solutions to project-specific issues by using science, research, and creativity, drawing on his work for over 100 dams and other hydraulic structures. Focusing his efforts on the hydraulic design of dams, spillways, and other hydraulic structures. He specializes in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and physical modeling and conducts field investigations and services.
Bill Dressel
Bill has more than 20 years of experience in dam engineering— 17 of which were gained in positions with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and Denver Water, where he worked on projects for over 100 different dams. Bill has extensive experience in the evaluation, design, and construction of embankment and concrete dams and appurtenant structures. Bill is a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)- approved Independent Consultant and Facilitator and has facilitated dozens of risk analyses.
At the USBR, Bill served as a technical specialist, was a part of the Dam Safety Advisory Team (DSAT) and a core Risk Cadre member. As a DSAT member, he regularly reviewed the adequacy of technical and risk assessments used to support USBR’s dam-safety program decisions. As a Risk Cadre member, Bill was responsible for developing consistent risk analysis methodology, training others to facilitate risk analyses, and working with USBR decision-makers to further the development of risk assessment processes. He co-authored several chapters of the most recent edition of the joint USBR/USACE Best Practices in Dam and Levee Safety Risk Analysis and was a peer reviewer for the 2022 USBR Dam Safety Public Protection Guidelines. He also regularly instructed technical dam-safety training classes (Best Practices, SEED, FEMA Dam Safety) for engineers and dam safety professionals from the USBR, USACE, and other federal and state agencies.
Adam Howard
Adam has 15 years of experience as a hydraulic and water resources engineer specializing in flood mitigation, stream restoration, stormwater management, and mine water management. A certified floodplain manager, he provides design services to public and private clients; leads stormwater modeling, feasibility studies, and design; and provides technical leadership for hydrologic and hydraulic (H&H) modeling. Prior to rejoining Barr in 2025, Adam served as a senior hydraulic engineer with the Saint Paul District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and was the Mississippi Valley Division’s Regional Technical Specialist for Hydraulic Design. In this role, he worked with multidisciplinary teams on large, fast-paced flood control projects requiring innovative hydraulic designs and coordination among multiple project partners.
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See more details from the 2026 Hydrology Days website:
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Learn more about our water and environmental engineering focused academic subdisciplines available in our Master of Science and Ph.D. programs.
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View the schedule of speakers and lecture abstracts from previous Water Engineering and Science seminars.