Dr. Robert Nairn

Dr. Robert Nairn holds both the David L. Boren Professorship and Sam K. Viersen Family Presidential Professorship in the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science at the University of Oklahoma, where he also serves as director of the Center for Restoration of Ecosystems & Watersheds (CREW) and associate director of the Water Technologies for Emerging Regions (WaTER) Center. Dr. Nairn is a member of the OK NSF EPSCoR Track-1 RII Award titled Socially Sustainable Solutions for Water, Carbon, and Infrastructure Resilience in Oklahoma. The $20 million research project is a social science-led, multi-disciplinary collaboration among social, physical, biological, engineering, and computational scientists. More than thirty researchers from across the state are working together on the project, which began July 1, 2020.

 

Dr. Nairn's primary research interests focus broadly on natural infrastructure, especially how functions and services provided by natural and engineered ecosystems provide benefit to the environment and society. Specifically, his research emphasizes watershed- and ecosystem-scale examinations of pollutant transport and fate and applications of ecological engineering, including the designing and building of ecosystems to solve water pollution problems. Dr. Nairn has experience in examining trace metal in mine drainage passive treatment systems; nutrient and related constituent removal from agricultural pollution, urban stormwater, and wastewater in wetlands; documenting receiving stream ecological recovery; as well as general ecosystem restoration and creation, and wetlands science. 

 

Dr. Nairn’s work on the OK NSF EPSCoR project examines the passive treatment of variable and marginal water quality. Treatment wetland mesocosm experiments will be performed to evaluate natural mechanisms (e.g., photolysis, sorption, biodegradation) which address contaminants of emerging concern in municipal wastewater. His research plays a key role in the project's Focus Area 3: Variable and Marginal Quality Water Supplies (V-MQW). The V-MQW Supplies focus area addresses issues surrounding Oklahoma’s water demands, which are projected to increase 600,000 acre-feet per year between 2007-2060. Reliable water supplies are needed to provide for these demands while meeting the state’s goal of capping freshwater use to 2010 levels. However, freshwater supplies are declining due to reservoir sedimentation and groundwater overdraft and are increasingly vulnerable to S2S variability. Concurrently, volumes of oil and gas ‘produced water,’ municipal wastewater, and stormwater are increasing with continued oil and gas development and urbanization. Disposal of produced waters has been correlated with seismicity, potentially impacting infrastructure and resulting in energy production curtailment in some regions. The challenge is finding a mix of solutions that allow Oklahoma’s diverse array of MQW to be economically treated for beneficial use to address water scarcity related to changing seasonal to sub-seasonal weather patterns, waste disposal, and infrastructure risk while supporting continued energy production and economic growth.