Art Schmidt received a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois in 1983 and his M.S. in Civil Engineering from University of Illinois in 1984. He worked as a Hydrologist for the Illinois District of the United States Geological Survey from 1983 to 1994. From 1994 to 1999 he was the Director of Technical Operations for HydroScience, Ltd., Inc., a consulting-engineering firm headquartered in Seffner Florida. From 1998 through 2000 he was the "Flow-Measurement Expert" for the 4th Lake Michigan Diversion Accounting Technical Committee. He returned to the University of Illinois in July 1999 and completed his Ph.D. degree in Environmental Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering (EHHE) in 2002. His, titled Analysis of Stage-Discharge Relations for Open-Channel Flows and Their Associated Uncertainties, was selected as one of two first-place finishers for the University Council on Water Resources Ph.D. Dissertation Award in the field of Natural Science and Engineering.

Dr. Schmidt has worked in the civil engineering profession since 1975--beginning part-time as part of a land-surveying crew--with a continually-increasing level of professional responsibility. His university-level course work comprises a comprehensive background in environmental hydraulics and hydrology and related topics including numerical methods, operations research, statistics, and water quality. This course work was all completed at the University of Illinois. In addition, Dr. Schmidt has completed many other courses offered through the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Weather Service, and university-extension programs. Courses relevant to his technical background include courses on four dynamic (unsteady-flow) hydraulic models, one hydrologic model, three solute transport and water-quality models, two courses on water-quality processes, a course on probability and statistics for hydrologic data, and several courses on technical writing and editing. Dr. Schmidt's general research interest is in the study of surface-water hydraulics and hydrology, especially focusing on methods to provide improved measurement and quantitative description of flows. Dr. Schmidt's current research involves a critical review of stage-discharge relations from a fluid-mechanics perspective. This research is expected to provide a means to develop theoretically based stage-discharge ratings for open-channels, significantly reducing the number of flow measurements needed to develop these ratings. In addition to his research, Dr. Schmidt taught CEE255, Introduction to HydroSystems Engineering, in the Fall 2001 semester and CEE 356, Hydraulics of Surface Drainage in the Spring, 2002 semester. Dr. Schmidt is s registered Professional Engineer in Florida and Illinois and is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

J. Wayland Eheart holds a B.S. in chemical engineering (University of Maryland 1966), M.S. in chemical engineering (North Carolina State University 1968), and Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering (University of Wisconsin 1975). He has been on the faculty of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 1978.

Dr. Eheart has taught the following courses in Civil and Environmental Engineering: CEE 241, 292, 341, 339, 439, and 441. He is currently working on a book for the 339 and 439 courses tentatively entitled Environmental Systems Analysis.

Dr. Eheart is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Phi Kappa Phi. He is a member of the Water Resources Standards Committee of ASCE, which has produced the ASCE Model Water Codes and is the editor of a recent ASCE publication from the same committee entitled: Riparian Water Regulations: Guidelines for Withdrawal Limitations and Permit Trading.

Murugesu Sivapalan holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering (University of Ceylon 1975), M.Eng in Water Resources Engineering (Asian Institute of Technology Thailand 1977), and M.A. (1983) and Ph.D (1986) in Civil Engineering, with a major in hydrology, from Princeton University.

Between 1978 and 1981, Dr Sivapalan worked as a consulting civil engineer in Nigeria. During the period 1986-1988 he served as a Research Associate at Princeton University. He spent the next 17 years at the University of Western Australia, Perth, joining as a Lecturer and being promoted to full Professor in 1999. Dr Sivapalan has also served as Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, and the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. He joined the University of Illinois in 2005.

Dr. Sivapalan has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in watershed hydrology, engineering hydrology, stochastic hydrology and water resources engineering. 

He is a member of the American Geophysical Union’s Surface Water Committee and the European Geophysical Society’s Catchment Hydrology Committee. Dr Sivapalan was the founding chair of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences’ (IAHS) Decade on Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB) initiative. He is a member of the editorial boards of several international journals and is the Executive Editor of the European Geophysical Union’s Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS) journal.

Dr Sivapalan has been elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, a Fellow of the Modeling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand, and a Life Member of the International Water Academy. He is the recipient of the European Geophysical Union’s John Dalton Medal and the Biennial Medal (for Natural Systems) of the Modeling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand. He has been awarded the Centenary Medal by the Australian Government “for service to Australian Society in Hydrology and Environmental Engineering.”

Barbara S. Minsker holds a B.S. (Cornell University 1986) in operations research and industrial engineering, and Ph.D. (Cornell University 1995) in environmental systems engineering. From 1986 to 1990, she worked as an environmental policy analyst at ICF Incorporated and Wade Miller Associates in Washington, D.C. From 1995 to 1996, Dr. Minsker was a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Vermont's Research Center for Groundwater Remediation Design. She has been on the faculty at the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 1996 and is a Faculty Affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Dr. Minsker has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in civil and environmental systems analysis, including introductory systems analysis for civil and environmental engineers, environmental systems analysis, environmental risk assessment and management, uncertainty in environmental and water resources decision making, and optimization methods for engineering design.

Dr. Minsker is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the ASCE Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI), the Association of Ground Water Scientists and Engineers, and the American Society for Engineering Education. She chairs the ASCE/EWRI Task Committee on Long-Term Groundwater Monitoring and is a member of the ASCE/EWRI Groundwater Management Committee, Environmental and Water Resource Systems Committee, and Evolutionary Computation Task Committee. She serves as associate editor for Water Resources Research and is a member of the AGU Groundwater Committee.

Dr. Minsker received the National Science Foundation Early Faculty Career (CAREER) Award in 1998 and the Army Young Investigator Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2000. In 2001, she was named a Center for Advanced Study Fellow. She has been an Arthur and Virginia Nauman Faculty Scholar since 2001.

Marcelo H. García holds a Ing. Dipl. (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina 1982) in water resources, M.S. (University of Minnesota 1985), and Ph.D. (University of Minnesota1989), both in civil engineering. He has been on the faculty of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 1990, and has served as Director of the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory since 1997. Prior to joining UIUC, he was a Research Fellow for two years at St. Anthony Falls Hydraulic Laboratory, University of Minnesota. While in college, Dr. García participated in several model studies of the Parana River under the supervision of the Russian hydraulician, Dr. Gertrud Onipchenko.

Dr. García teaches an undergraduate course on Water Resources Engineering and Hydraulic Engineering. At the graduate level he teaches Environmental Hydrodynamics, Sediment Transport, River Mechanics, and Open-Channel Hydraulics. He has taught courses on Hydrodynamics of Sediment Transport at the University of Genoa, Italy (1993), the California Institute of Technology (1997) and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Laussane, Switzerland (1999). He has also taught short courses in Argentina, Chile, Hong Kong, Mexico and Spain. Recently, he taught a week-long course on “Sediment Transport During Extreme Hydrologic Events” at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), and at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Argentina.

The author of the book Hydrodinamica Ambiental (Environmental Hydrodynamics), García is widely published in scholarly journals and conference proceedings. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Sedimentation Engineering Manual 54 (Volume II) to be published by the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is the Chair of the Sedimentation Committee of the Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI) and has served as Editor of the Journal of Hydraulic Research (IAHR) since 2001. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, International Association of Hydraulic Engineering and Research, International Water Resources Association, and American Geophysical Union.

Among his awards and honors, Dr. García has received the Excellence in Advising Award from the College of Engineering in 1997 and 2001. He was named an Arthur and Virginia Nauman Faculty Scholar in 1999 by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a University Scholar for 2000-2003 and the first Chester and Helen Siess Professor of Civil Engineering in 2001. He has consistently appeared in the Daily Illini’s “Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.” He received the Karl Emil Hilgard Hydraulic Prize from ASCE for best publication in Journal of Hydraulic Engineering in 1996 and 1999, and the Walter L. Huber Research Prize for excellence in research from ASCE in 1998. In 2001, he received the 12th Arthur Thomas Ippen Award from the International Association of Hydraulic Engineering and Research (IAHR). In 2001, Professor García was named Honorary Professor by his Alma Mater, the Universidad Nacional del litoral, Santa Fé, Argentina.

Related to water problems in the State of Illinois, Dr. García developed physical models of the Boneyard Creek, Urbana, to help in the solution of flooding problems. With the help of another large-scale model, he redesigned lowhead dams on the Fox River to reduce the number of drowning accidents, and designed canoe chutes for the same dams in order to increase the safe recreational use of Illinois Streams. He has also worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to mitigate navigation problems caused by sedimentation and vegetation in the Upper Mississippi River Basin as well as with the design of a bubble-plume aeration system for McCook Reservoir in Chicago, to be built for stormwater management at a cost of 400 million dollars.