A memorial reception for civil and environmental engineering professor James H. Clarke is Saturday, Jan. 28, 2023, at 1 p.m. in Featheringill Hall’s Jacobs Believed in Me Auditorium. The reception is open to the Vanderbilt University community. The memorial also will be live streamed here.
Clarke, 77, was a nationally recognized expert in nuclear and hazardous waste management and remediation and wastewater treatment. He retired in August 2022 after 42 years at Vanderbilt. He died Oct. 31 in Brentwood, Tennessee.
“Jim was a thought leader in the field of nuclear and hazardous waste management and remediation area. He made significant contributions in advancing the state-of-the-art in his field and left a long-lasting legacy by contributing to the training of the next generation of researchers and practitioners. He will be greatly missed by the Vanderbilt faculty, students and staff,” said Caglar Oskay, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Clarke joined the engineering faculty in 1980 as an adjunct assistant professor. From 2000 to 2019, he was a professor of the practice in civil and environmental engineering. He continued to serve on the engineering faculty as an adjunct professor until fall 2022.
Prior to joining the school of engineering, Clarke was chairman, president and CEO of Eckenfelder, Inc, an environmental engineering and consulting firm focused on hazardous waste management and remediation. Clarke had 45 years of professional experience with more than 250 publications and presentations. Clarke earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physical chemistry in 1973 from Johns Hopkins University.
Clarke served as a member of the former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste and Materials and advised the Commission and the Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards on issues concerning the Yucca Mountain project regarding site decommissioning and remediation and the overall nuclear waste regulatory program. In 2008 he received a Distinguished Service award from the NRC for his service on its Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste and Materials.
In 2011, Clarke was elected to the executive committee of the American Nuclear Society’s Decommissioning, Decontamination and Reutilization Division for a three-year term. He served on the executive board of the Environmental Science Division of the ANS. He also served on committees of the National Research Council and was a peer reviewer for the National Academies, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy.
Clarke was accepted into the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists as a board-certified environmental engineering member in the 2012 inaugural class. In 2021, he was awarded the Stanley E. Kappe Award by the AAEES. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
Clarke was preceded in death by his wife Ann in 2020. In the 2000s, she also was an adjunct professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Contact: Brenda Ellis, 615 343-6314
brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu