Wastes and Toxics

As an immigrant, issues of race, equity, and inclusion have always been central to my lived experience and values. As an environmental engineer and policy analyst, I feel grateful to align my convictions with my experience and to lead ERG’s environmental and climate justice solutions practice.

I feel fortunate to work with so many dedicated researchers at EPA and other agencies on remediating contaminated water sources, adapting to climate change, and providing decision-support in related areas. While my particular expertise is groundwater, I’ve had the opportunity to lead projects in urban planning, coral reefs, climate change resilience, emergency response, stormwater, modeling, and more. Multi-disciplinary approaches are helpful for tackling all these issues, and I’m always learning.

In my experience, effective climate action requires invested leadership, multidisciplinary expertise to address all sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and equitable stakeholder engagement to guide and successfully implement new policies and strategies. I have had the pleasure of managing several climate action plan projects, guiding both municipalities and universities through the process of developing and implementing their unique plans, and I’m proud of the positive benefits those plans have brought to stem the effects of climate change.

I always appreciate when our government clients ask us to help them quantify the benefits and costs of actions they are considering. The more complex assignments, such as accurately characterizing behavioral changes under multiple compliance scenarios, put a premium on our creativity and experience.

The synergy between my enforcement and chemical evaluation work is invaluable. Because of the overlap, I routinely apply my skills and knowledge from one field to the other. This makes my work more efficient and enables me to approach it more holistically.

Sustainability has been a central theme throughout my career. As an engineer, I particularly enjoy crafting approaches and tools to efficiently reduce chemical and energy inputs, guided by lessons learned from sustainability initiatives worldwide.

Each year, Americans generate millions of tons of waste and consume increasing amounts of resources. Educating and helping the public and organizations learn how they can reduce, reuse, and recycle has been a major focus of my career. I take great satisfaction in applying my extensive waste reduction knowledge to help my clients design and implement strategies to reduce the impact that waste has on the U.S. environment.

Through my experience operating water systems, I have come to appreciate how dedicated utility staff are to ensuring that communities have safe drinking water. Whether I’m providing technical assistance or conducting a compliance inspection that may call out an issue, I have great respect for all who strive to protect human health under whatever site-specific challenges they may be working with.

I am driven to apply pragmatic, preventive approaches to preserve and protect our environment for the next generation. I enjoy seeing project results that lead to improved worker health and safety and a cleaner environment.

Bringing regulators and the regulated community together, educating them on each other’s concerns, and helping to find environmentally preferable and economically feasible solutions is one of the most enjoyable parts of my work.

Until recently, we have too often taken an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” approach to waste disposal and overlooked the connection between surface and ground water, leading to contamination and depletion of both. We have to climb out of this history of environmental exploitation to a path of sustainability. I enjoy all my work to help get us there, including groundwater remediation, reducing sanitary sewer overflows, ensuring proper operation of injection wells, aquifer storage and recovery systems, and design of new water production wells.

My passion for protecting the natural world stems from a childhood spent enjoying the outdoor expanses and natural beauty of Colorado. Now, I channel that passion into developing innovative approaches for collecting and analyzing large environmental datasets to help address many of the most pressing environmental challenges we face today. I am incredibly fortunate to collaborate with amazing colleagues and clients in pursuit of creative solutions for monitoring and protecting our environment.

I find that field work is the best way to understand compliance issues. By seeing process operations firsthand, we can help EPA get to the root of issues and support the agency in determining the best ways to minimize waste generation and disposal across industrial sectors.