As global demands on fresh water resources escalate, there are mounting pressures on natural systems and increasing needs to find sustainable solutions to address global water and sanitation challenges.

The Water  Innovation and Reuse Lab (WIRLab) trains and mentors undergraduate and graduate students from diverse groups to take on these environmental challenges by conducting research on water reuse technologies, sustainable sanitation solutions, and biogeochemical interactions between natural organic matter (NOM), solutes, sediments, and microorganisms in natural and engineered systems. Current projects investigate the degradation and persistence of organic chemicals in anaerobic and aerobic decentralized water reuse systems, sources of anthropogenic contaminants in urban rivers,  water quality response to stream vegetation restoration, and mobility of toxic trace elements, such as arsenic. We also apply optical spectroscopic techniques for rapid tracking of organic contaminants in source waters, streams, rivers, and groundwater.
WIRLAB NEWS
  • WIRLab is recruiting MS students for various projects , starting summer/fall 2019
  • Now hiring Postdoc  in post-fire water quality!
December 2018
  • Kristen Snyder and Fed Pinongcos present their research at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in Washington DC.
November 2018
  • Congratulations to Kristen Snyder who successfully defended her thesis on the persistence of dissolved compounds from oil spills and oil seeps!!
  • D. Garcia, S. Chao, and C. Graves present posters on urban creek water quality and decentralized MBRs for water reuse at SCCUR, the Southern California Conferences on Undergraduate Research in Pasadena, CA.
  • L. Mendoza and WIRLab receive Student Success Fee funds for SDSU to host a Global Water Sustainability Symposium in April 2019.
  • Wasswa et al. paper on "Assessing the potential of fluorescence spectroscopy to monitor contaminants in source waters and water reuse systems" just accepted in Environmental Science: Water Research and Technology.
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