Principal Investigator
Dr. Marc Beutel is an associate professor of environmental engineering in the School of Engineering at UC Merced, where he started in July 2015.
Before this, he was in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Washington State University. Dr. Beutel earned a B.S. in civil and environmental engineering from UCLA, and a M.S. in environmental engineering and Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the sustainable management of dilute pollutants in the aquatic environment. Research topics include strategies to repress mercury bioaccumulation in California reservoirs, including super-oxygenation using pure oxygen gas, and the use of natural treatment systems, include surface-flow vegetated wetlands and rock biofilters, to enhance surface water quality. Dr. Beutel won a NSF CAREER focusing on oxygenation and mercury cycling in lakes with a water-science outreach component to high school student on the Colville Indian Reservation. During the 2013-2014 academic year, Dr. Beutel was on sabbatical at the University of Florence where he worked with Italian colleagues evaluating the use of tree bark as a simple and inexpensive biomonitor of atmosphere mercury pollution. He is an active member of the American Ecological Engineering Society.