Information about the nominated candidate:
Dr. Knightes is a Research Environmental Engineer (level equivalent of full professor) at the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development since September 2002. His research focuses on the development, application, and evaluation of environmental contaminant fate and transport models for watersheds, fresh water bodies, and estuaries, with particular interest in researching processes governing contaminants and incorporating algorithms describing these processes into numerical, mechanistic modeling frameworks. Contaminants of interest include nutrients, mercury, metals, organic compounds (e.g., PAHs, PCBs, pesticides), and emerging contaminants (e.g., nanomaterials). While at EPA, he has received 2 US EPA Gold Medals and a US EPA Silver Medal. He received his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University, MS in Environmental Health Engineering from Northwestern University, and BS in Physics from University of Rochester.
Reasons why the candidate would be suitable for an iEMSs office or board position and any topical or operational areas of iEMSs they would contribute to:
I have become a member on the board in 2018. In the last year, I became the lead of the outreach committee and have been working with the president and others to improve communication with the society. For example, we have had started quarterly webinars and newsletters, started using twitter again, and are working on updating the website. I would like to continue the development of these as well as improving other means of keeping the members of the community informed as well as reaching out beyond our membership to communicate the interesting and important research and science being done by members of the society. I am also a member of the conference committee, and I look forward to increasing involvement there .
The nominated candidate’s previous contributions to iEMSs society activities and advancing the science of environmental modelling and software:
I am currently on the outreach and conference committees, and I have been actively working with the president and other board members in those regards, and I look forward to continuing with those. In my work, I have been actively involved in developing, applying, and evaluating contaminant fate and transport, numerical, mechanistic modeling. I am the developer of Spreadsheet-based Ecological Risk Assessment for the Fate of Mercury (SERAFM), which was published in EMS, and is used in regulatory applications for mercury in the US. I also was the lead author and co-developer for a complete architectural overhaul of the Water Quality Analysis Simulation Program (upgrade to WASP8) Advanced Toxicant Module, where we introduced a state variable for nanomaterials, which was published in EMS.
