Two New Faculty Hired at OSU through OK NSF EPSCoR S3OK RII Award
EPSCoR Update - July 2022
The Socially Sustainable Solutions for Water, Carbon, and Infrastructure Resilience in Oklahoma (S3OK) researchers aim to develop and test socially sustainable, science-based solutions for complex (“wicked”) problems at the intersection of land use, water availability, and infrastructure in Oklahoma (OK). S3OK will employ a framework informed by theories of public policy learning to invest in science at the intersections of four Focus Areas: (1) changing subseasonal to seasonal weather patterns (S2S), (2) variable and marginal quality water supplies (V-MQW), (3) shifting terrestrial water and carbon dynamics (TWCD), and (4) sustainable water and energy infrastructure (SI).
The design of the S3OK project provides a platform for enhancing STEM education across multiple academic levels; developing and increasing diverse and competent future generations of STEM workforce; improving public awareness across various age groups and demographics; serving the state by providing innovative technologies and resilient solutions; cultivating effective collaboration among universities, colleges, and institutes; and building human capacity through new faculty hires.
Oklahoma State University (OSU), through the S3OK project, hired two new faculty members last Fall semester to help build the human capacity of the V-MQW team, which is working to develop new engineering technologies and modeling schemes to enable more effective reuse of marginal quality water and improve understanding of water treatment efficiencies that are beneficial to utility sectors and end-users.
Mary Elizabeth Foltz has joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at OSU as an assistant professor. Her areas of expertise include holistic tracing of biogeochemical contaminant transformations across water and gas phases in engineered and natural systems and multi-scale modeling from mechanistic to global climate models.
Foltz joins OSU from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she earned her doctorate (2021) and master’s degrees (2017) in environmental engineering, and a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from Indiana University Bloomington.
“Dr. Foltz will lead V-MQW tasks in examining temporally variant greenhouse gas emissions under different conditions in wetlands and in assessing the sustainability of natural infrastructure options for wastewater reuse compared to conventional methods,” Mark Krzmarzick (V-MQW team lead) said.
Kiranmayi Mangalgiri has joined OSU’s Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering. Her research expertise lies in the intersection of determining the occurrence and fate of organic contaminants of emerging concern (CEC) in natural and engineered systems, and the development and design of treatment systems for contaminant mitigation in water and waste streams to facilitate safe and sustainable water reuse and resource recovery.
Mangalgiri joins OSU from the University of California Riverside, where she was a postdoctoral research fellow. She earned her doctorate degree in environmental engineering from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in civil engineering from Texas A&M University and the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India, respectively.
“Dr. Mangalgiri will help the V-MQW team with compiling CEC data for municipal wastewater effluent and stormwater samples in OK and reviewing passive treatment approaches for removal efficiency for various classes of CEC,” Mark Krzmarzick said.
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Funding for this project was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. OIA-1946093 through OK NSF EPSCoR.
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