Faculty and Staff

Academic Faculty

Christopher Bellona

Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Membrane processes/Fate of organic contaminants in water and wastewater treatment; Potable water reuse. Advanced oxidation for the destruction of organic contaminants. Remediation of contaminated sites.
cbellona@mines.edu

Tzahi Cath

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering Brackish water and seawater desalination; water and wastewater treatment engineering; potable water reuse; energy recovery in water treatment.
tcath@mines.edu

Joe Crocker

Teaching Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Structural materials and design; geotechnical and structural engineering; curriculum development.
jcrocker@mines.edu

Linda Figueroa

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Microbially mediated radionuclide and metals removal; biotransformation of nitrogen; application of molecular tools; water and waste treatment.
lfiguero@mines.edu

D.V. Griffiths

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Finite element modeling of geotechnical problems across a spectrum ranging from traditional areas of foundations engineering, to oil recovery geomechanics and probabilistic methods.
vgriffit@mines.edu

Andres Guerra

Teaching Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Innovative approaches to educate CSM students about civil engineering applications in geotechnical and structural engineering, land development, construction practices, risk assessment, and optimization.
aguerra@mines.edu

Marte Gutierrez

James R. Paden Distinguished Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Geomechanics; coupled multiphase fluid flow, thermal and geomechanical processes in porous and fractured media; experimental studies and computational modeling.
mgutierr@mines.edu

Reza Hedayat

Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Geotechnical Engineering; Rock and Fracture Mechanics; Underground Construction and Tunneling; Applied Geophysics; Hydraulic Fracturing.
hedayat@mines.edu

Christopher Higgins

Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Environmental organic chemistry; inorganic and organic contaminant fate and transport; contaminant bioaccumulation; perfluorochemicals; nanoparticles.
chiggins@mines.edu

Terri Hogue

Professor and Department Head, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Surface hydrology; catchment response to wildfire, urbanization and climate variability; watershed modeling, parameter estimation, remote sensing, and field studies.
thogue@mines.edu

Jeffrey A. Holley

Teaching Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Engineering mechanics; environmental studies; civil infrastructure design; storm water management; storm water quality enhancement.
jholley@mines.edu

Tissa Illangasekare

Professor, AMAX Distinguished Chair Director, Center for Experimental Study of Environmental Processes (CESEP), Civil and Environmental Engineering
Subsurface flow; transport and fate of chemicals in porous media; groundwater hydrology; numerical modeling; fracture flow; flow in snow; NAPLs.
tillanga@mines.edu

Kristoph Kinzli

Teaching Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
River mechanics; stream rehabilitation; water resources; agricultural water use; fisheries biology; engineering teaching pedagogy; and active learning.
kkinzli@mines.edu

Panos Kiousis

Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
High strength concrete; self-consolidating concrete; soil structure interaction; dynamic controls; earthquake engineering; constitutive modeling of materials; computational methods and finite elements.
pkiousis@mines.edu

Amy Landis

Professor, Mines Presidential Fellow for Diversity, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Quantitative sustainability of renewable fuels; biobased products and plastics and healthcare. Developing new sustainability tools in Life Cycle Assessment, industrial ecology, & systems analysis.
amylandis@mines.edu

Hongyan Liu

Teaching Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Teaching interests are engineering mechanics, structural analysis and design, and engineering materials. Research interests are structural engineering and earthquake engineering.
hyliu@mines.edu

Ning Lu

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Soil physical phenomena including fluid flow, chemical transport, heat transfer, stress, and deformation; unifying atomic-scale potentials, inter-particle forces, and engineering-scale stresses in soils; groundwater hydrology, unsaturated soil mechanics, expansive soils, environmental geotechnics.
ninglu@mines.edu

John McCray

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Contaminant hydrology; subsurface remediation; vadose-zone hydrology; subsurface vapor-transport; watershed hydrology; mathematical modeling; soil-based wastewater treatment.
jmccray@mines.edu

Michael Mooney

Professor, Grewcock University Endowed Chair, Director, Center for Underground Construction & Tunneling and SmartGeo, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Tunnel design and construction in soil and soil/rock conditions; earth dams and levees; data-driven risk reduction in geotechnical problems; instrumentation and monitoring; geoconstruction.
mmooney@mines.edu

Junko Munakata Marr

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Biological degradation of organic compounds; microbial communities in groundwater and water treatment systems; application of molecular biology techniques to environmental systems.
jmmarr@mines.edu

Shiling Pei

Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Extreme hazard mitigation; structural reliability; modern timber structural systems; structural dynamics and earthquake engineering.
spei@mines.edu

Susan Reynolds

Teaching Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Structural analysis and design; historic preservation technology; sustainable / integrated design approaches for buildings.
sreynold@mines.edu

Jonathan Sharp

Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Environmental microbiology and biogeochemistry; biotechnological applications toward groundwater remediation and water reuse; bacterial cytochrome-mediated degradation of emerging organic contaminants with a focus on micropollutants such as nitrosamines; bioattenuation of metals and radionuclides.
jsharp@mines.edu

Kamini Singha

Professor, Geology and Geological Engineering
Groundwater flow and solute transport in porous media and fractured rock; groundwater-surface water interaction; environmental geophysics; geostatistics.
ksingha@mines.edu

Kathleen M. Smits

Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Multiphase processes affected by heat and mass flux dynamics; land/atmospheric interfaces at a wide range of physical scales.
ksmits@mines.edu

John Spear

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Environmental microbiology; metalbioremediation; environmental policy and impact analysis.
jspear@mines.edu

Timothy Strathmann

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Catalysts and advanced materials for water and energy applications; hydrothermal biomass conversion technologies; wastewater and waste solid valorization; aquatic fate and treatment of contaminants of emerging concern; life cycle analysis-directed design of environmental technologies.
strthmnn@mines.edu

Alexandra Wayllace

Teaching Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Areas of focus include designing and conducting experiments to measure different soil properties for saturated and unsaturated soils.
awayllac@mines.edu