New Professor at Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech recently hired a new co-director for their Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Lab in northern Virginia. Stanley Grant came to VT from University of California Irvine, and he will also serve as a professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department. Grant has always been interested in nutrient pollution and transport, spending the last several years focusing on stream beds and their roles in nutrient cycling.

At UC Irvine, Grant was the Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded UCI Water-PIRE (Partnerships for International Research & Education), a program focused on research exchange between Australia and the United States. When the program was started, Australia was suffering from a Millennium Drought, and Grant was hopeful that some of Australia’s strategies for dealing with that crisis could be applicable to drought issues in southern California.

The program was extremely successful, graduating 12 PhD students and 3 post-doctoral students, all of whom are now in faculty positions. They also supported an undergraduate program where 48 students from the United States participated in a two-week field camp in Australia, followed by intense four-week period back in the States analyzing data and preparing and delivering presentations at a conference. In addition to training young scientists, the program also produced over 50 research articles, including a feature article in Science.

As the project was ending two years ago, Grant received a multi-campus Center Grant from the UC Office of the President, to apply lessons learned in Australia to southern California, using all five of the Southern UC campuses (UCI, UCLA, UCSD, UCR, and UCSB) as living laboratories for the capture and treatment of storm water runoff using green infrastructure, such as biofilters.

Last summer, after he moved to Virginia Tech, Grant and an interdisciplinary group of engineers and scientists were awarded an NSF Planning Grant to explore the idea of developing a bid for a NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) focused on global nutrient pollution. The team submitted their vision for an NSF ERC (which comes with up to $50 million over ten years to help solve “grand challenge” issues) mid-January (to read more about the proposal, which uses the Chesapeake Bay as a “super-testbed”, see our CRaB article on this project). “It’s a moonshot, but if we’re successful, it’ll give us the chance to translate the amazing successes achieved by the Chesapeake Bay TMDL into actionable information for the rest of the country and world,” explained Grant.

At the OWML, Grant hopes to bring a fresh perspective to northern Virginia. Some of the projects the 40-year-old lab works on include drinking water in Fairfax and reusing water and recycling sewage. To prepare for his role there, Grant has been meeting with stakeholders and getting to know northern Virginia. “Virginia Tech is a great opportunity,” said Grant, “I’m excited about the connections with the team of researchers studying in the Chesapeake Bay. This is an incredible party.”