David Kosson is the fourth Vanderbilt environmental engineering faculty member in three years to be accepted into the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists as a board certified environmental engineering member.
He joins Eugene LeBoeuf, professor of civil engineering, who was accepted in December 2013; Steven L. Krahn, professor of the practice of nuclear environmental engineering, who was accepted into the academy in July 2013; and James Clarke, professor of the practice of civil and environmental engineering, who received an inaugural environmental scientist certification in April 2012.
Kosson is a Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and of chemical engineering, and director of the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation.
Kosson is a national authority on the management of highly hazardous materials in a safe and environmental responsible manner. These include chemical weapons, nuclear waste and by-products of manufacturing and energy production. He played a major role in the successful program to destroy the nation’s aging stockpile of binary nerve gas (GB and VX) agents.
For more than 15 years, he has been involved in analyzing the risks involved in the disposition of military nuclear wastes. He leads a $32 million multidisciplinary Department of Energy program that works with stakeholders to design cost-effective and politically acceptable plans for cleaning up the nation’s nuclear weapons sites.
Most recently he and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Charles Powers have devised and are championing a plan that they argue can revive the stalled effort to properly dispose of the growing amounts of radioactive waste produced by the nation’s commercial nuclear reactors.
Kosson has participated in or led many external technical reviews on nuclear waste processing for the Department of Energy including for tank wastes and a range of technology approaches at Hanford, Savannah River and Idaho sites.
His research in collaboration with the Energy Research Centre of The Netherlands on leaching of contaminants from wastes and construction materials and development of the leaching environmental assessment framework (LEAF) is currently providing the foundation for environmental regulation of these materials at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Netherlands Ministry of Environment and the European Union’s Directorate General for the Environment.
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Contact:
Brenda Ellis, (615) 343-6314
Brenda.Ellis@Vanderbilt.edu
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