(The Center Square) – University of New Mexico researchers are leading a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency project to diversify the water industry workforce.
Anjali Mulchandani, an assistant professor in the Gerald May Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, is the project’s leader. The project is called “Educating the Future Workforce on Adapting Water Infrastructure to Climate Change Impacts on the Natural Environment.”
Mulchandani is the principal investigator on the project, alongside co-principal investigator Heather Himmelberger, director of the UNM’s Southwest Environmental Finance Center.
The project is a collaboration between four other schools: Wichita State University, Syracuse University, Arizona State University, and Morgan State University in Maryland. Mulchandani emphasized that three of those colleges are “minority-serving and/or Hispanic-serving institutions,” according to the release: UNM, Morgan State, and Arizona State.
“The idea is to increase and diversify our water workforce and prepare them to address climate change impacts to our natural and built environment,” Mulchandani said in the release. “Women and people of color are underrepresented in the water workforce. This project’s inclusion of three minority-serving institutions will provide us the opportunity to expose a diverse body of students to career options in the water industry and give them professional development and science communication training to set them up for success in their future career.”
Mulchandani thinks this EPA project will help encourage students to study water infrastructure who otherwise might not.
“It will be open to undergraduates from any major who are interested in learning about water infrastructure careers,” she said. “Our Water Science Communication Fellowship that this project was modeled on had participants from civil, chemical and mechanical engineering, construction management, computer science, environmental science, biology, physics, math, geography, economics, political science, speech and hearing, medical lab science, sociology, international studies, and even German!”
The program will teach students how climate change impacts water resources and infrastructure, she said.
“A lot of the water infrastructure in this country is over 60 years old and must be repaired or upgraded to take into consideration the issues surrounding climate change,” she said in the release. “We want to teach our students 21st-century infrastructure and design with resilience and sustainability in mind.”
Mulchandani added that the five universities selected are diverse because they have different student bodies and are in varying parts of the country.
“We in the Southwest know and manage water in a different way than, say, Syracuse, New York,” Mulchandani said in the release. “In desert communities like New Mexico and Arizona, ‘green’ spaces and infrastructure have a desert color palette with shades of green and brown and can be seen as a reflection of our natural landscape and just as beautiful.”
The program will feature graduate student and faculty mentorships, group projects, field trips, job shadowing, guest lectures, and the development of solutions catered to regional needs, the release said.
The project will start on October 1, 2024, and finish on September 30, 2027. UNM will receive about $600,000 in taxpayer funds from the EPA to fund the project.
