Graduate Research Assistantships in Urban Water Systems
Dr. Walter McDonald in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at Marquette University is seeking PhD and/or Masters students for two fully-funded graduate research assistantship positions.
Position 1: Tire-wear-derived chemicals in green stormwater infrastructure. The goal of this project is to understand the transport, fate, and treatment of tire-wear-derived chemicals within green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) and other stormwater BMPs. The student will conduct field monitoring and storm-event sampling to characterize contaminant loading, retention, and export and evaluate how hydrology and infrastructure characteristics influence treatment performance. Preference will be given to candidates with backgrounds in environmental engineering, urban hydrology, stormwater management, water quality, environmental chemistry, or related areas.
Position 2: Distributed sensing and machine learning for urban water systems. The goal of this project is to identify flow sources and hydrologic pathways in urban water infrastructure using distributed temperature sensing (DTS), machine learning, and data fusion. The student will work with DTS datasets from wastewater and stormwater/GSI systems and develop data-driven methods to interpret large spatial-temporal datasets with limited labeled storm events. Research may include anomaly detection, limited-label learning, physics-informed machine learning, and integration of DTS with rainfall, flow, groundwater, soil moisture, and other sensing data. Preference will be given to candidates with backgrounds in environmental or civil engineering, hydrology, water infrastructure, data science, machine learning, sensing, or related quantitative fields.
The positions have an anticipated start date of Summer or Summer of Fall 2027. Interested candidates should send a statement of interest and a resume to Dr. Walter McDonald (walter.mcdonald@marquette.edu), as well as complete a graduate school application at http://www.marquette.edu/grad/future-apply.php/.