ABOUT

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia's Department of Crop and Soil Sciences.  In 2012, I entered graduate school with a MS in forest and landscape ecology, a research site and an (overly) ambitious research project of my own design.  I wanted to study how engineering hydrologic flowpaths through mine spoil can maintain stream water quality below mountaintop removal and valley fill mining (MTR/VF) sites in Central Appalachia.

 

In 2007, a "hydrologic isolation" project was implemented at a MTR/VF site in eastern Kentucky to control the level of total dissolved solids in mine effluent leaving the site. My thesis is that if hydrologic flow paths are engineered to minimize surface and groundwater contact with sulfide-bearing materials, downstream water quality can be preserved. This study will increase our understanding of how this "hydrologic isolation" technique altered mine site hydrology and affected downstream water quality.

 

In 2015, I secured grant funding through the Electric Power Research Institute to implement this study as a "proof of concept" on campus in collaboration with Watershed UGA and at remote coal mine in eastern Kentucky.