Werth Named New Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Chair
Charles Werth will be the next chair of the Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.
Werth holds the Bettie Margaret Smith Chair of Environmental Health Engineering, and he has been with the department for 12 years. He is an expert in pollutants and their removal from vital groundwater and drinking water sources.
“This is an exciting opportunity to affect and improve people’s lives through the big problems we take on in civil, architectural and environmental engineering,” said Werth. “The department, and our industry as a whole, is at an inflection point, and I look forward to helping shape that future.”
Werth succeeds Bob Gilbert, who led the department for eight years, including the 2023 naming for Fariborz Maseeh. Gilbert began a years-long effort to reimagine how civil, architectural and environmental engineering will be taught to future generations of students, and Werth will pick up that mantle as the next department chair.
The department is home to top 10 graduate and undergraduate programs in environmental and civil engineering. It is one of the largest departments of its kind, with more than a century of history and tradition.
“Unprecedented environmental challenges, societal shifts and technological advances demand novel approaches that present our profession with both an opportunity and a pressing need,” Gilbert wrote in a recent letter to the department. “Our department is poised to meet this challenge in education and research.”
For the last few years, Werth has split his time between UT and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy. As a program director there, he focused primarily on advancing new energy-relevant technologies in the water treatment space. He led the RECOVER program, which allocated $40 million to 14 projects focused on developing new technologies to recover commercially relevant forms of critical minerals and ammonia from various wastewater sources, including produced water, mine tailings effluent and municipal wastewater.
Throughout his time at UT, Werth has worked on technologies to remove nitrate from water systems. A byproduct of fertilizer, nitrate poses human health risks and impacts treatment plants, regularly forcing utilities to shut down contaminated drinking water sources. Werth and his students have pioneered new ways to use catalysts in electrochemical reactors to convert nitrate to either innocuous dinitrogen gas, or the value-added end product ammonia. They’ve evaluated a number of prototype reactors, ranging in scale from the bench top to a small pilot, and are working to improve the technology so it can operate at large-scale utilities.
Werth is also working on technologies to remediate pollutants, such as chlorinated solvents, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, in groundwater. He and his students have evaluated a suite of technologies to advance in situ cleanup, including strong adsorbents to prevent pollutants in groundwater from impacting nearby drinking water wells and redox-active species or catalysts to promote pollutant destruction.
Throughout his career, Werth has won numerous awards and honors, including a Humboldt Research Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and fellowships from the Department of Energy and the German Research Society. He served on the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, and the Board of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors.