Contact Information

Phone: (512) 471-4642
Fax: (512) 471-5870
Email: reible@mail.utexas.edu

Dr. Reible is the Bettie Margaret Smith Chair of Environmental Health Engineering at the University of Texas and Director of the Hazardous Substance Research Center/South & Southwest, a consortium of Louisiana State University, Rice University, Texas A&M, Georgia Tech and the University of Texas. Dr. Reible has been active in technical and policy issues associated with the assessment and in-situ remediation of contaminated sites. He has served on several National Research Council committees and currently serves on the NRC Board of Environmental Studies and Toxicology. He has provided Congressional testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Water Resources and the Environment on strategies for the management of contaminated sediment sites. He is a Diplomate of the American Academy of Environmental Engineering and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for the “development of widely used approaches for the management of contaminated sediments”.

In his own research, Dr. Reible leads both fundamental and applied efforts in the assessment and management of risks of hazardous substances, especially as they apply to contaminated sediments. Dr. Reible has led the development of in-situ sediment capping and currently leads a large demonstration of active capping technologies in the Anacostia River in Washington DC. He has evaluated the applicability of capping technology to a wide range of contaminants and settings including PAHs from fuels, manufactured gas plants and creosote manufacturing facilities, PCBs, and metals. He has also advised both industry and regulatory groups on the applicability and design of capping for remediation at a variety of specific sites.

His research has also focused on the natural attenuation processes of contaminants as a result of a variety of processes in the environment. These processes are biological, chemical and physical in nature and thus the research has encouraged the development of interdisciplinary teams focused on understanding and manipulating these processes. Among these processes are bioturbation, the contaminant migration associated with the normal life-cycle activities of sediment-dwelling organisms, physico-chemical desorption resistance leading to reduced availability of contaminants, , the evaporation of volatile contaminants from soils and sediments, and facilitated sorption and transport associated with the presence of colloidal organic carbon pore-waters.

Dr. Reible completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in 1982. In 2004 he joined the University of Texas after 23 years in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Louisiana State University (LSU). In 1991 he was a Senior Visitor to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. He also served as Shell Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Sydney, Australia between 1993 and 1995 while on leave from LSU. He returned to LSU as Director of the Hazardous Substance Research Center in 1995.

Dr. Reible was awarded a New Engineering Educator Excellence Award by the American Society of Engineering Education in 1986 and named an Environmental Science and Engineering Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1987. He is the recipient of the Lawrence K. Cecil Environmental Division Award of the AIChE for 2001 and the Charles E. Coates Award of the Local Sections of the ACS and AIChE for 2002. He is the author of the textbooks, “Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering” and “Diffusion Models of Environmental Transport”, and more than 100 refereed technical papers. He has also edited three books. He is an Associate Editor of the Chemical Engineering Journal, the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association, the Journal of Environmental Forensics, and the Journal of Environmental Engineering. He has also held national office in the AIChE, including National Programming Committee Chair, Meeting Program Chair (San Diego, 1991) and Chair of the Environmental Division of the organization.