Chad Jafvert

Background

About Chad Jafvert

Chad Jafvert received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1985 in Civil and Environmental Engineering and was awarded a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship to work at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Environmental Research Laboratory in Athens, GA. After one year in that position, he was hired at the same laboratory where he worked until joining the faculty at Purdue in 1991. While at the EPA, he earned a Scientific and Technological Achievement Award. While at Purdue, he was elected and served as area head of the environmental and hydraulic engineering group in the School of Civil Engineering for two consecutive terms (1996, In 2013, he was honored as a visiting professor by the President of Southeast University, Nanjing, China, and again in 2014 he was honored as a distinguished visiting professor by the President of Qinghai Normal University, Xining, China. His primary research interests are the chemical and physicochemical fate processes of anthropogenic (man-made) substances in natural and engineered environments. He has published widely on octanol-water, soil-water and sediment-water phase distribution processes of organic chemicals, including organic cations and anions. His recent interests include: remediation strategies for contaminated sediments; aquatic photochemistry of pollutants including carbon-based nanomaterials and flame-retardant compounds; real-time continuous water quality monitoring, and drinking water treatment in rural areas of developing countries. He teaches water chemistry courses, water quality modeling courses, and over the past several years, a service learning course on drinking water treatment in under-developed areas around the global, with an outcome being the installation of point-of-use slow sand filters in Tanzania, Kenya, Western China, India, and in many rural elementary schools in Colombia.