Events Video Library

Klamath Dam Removal
Join us to hear from Mark Bransom, Chief Executive Officer of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, about the cooperative effort to re-establish the natural vitality of the Klamath River so that it can support all communities in the Klamath basin. Mark will detail the journey KRRC has been on to decommission four dams along the Klamath River to restore river health, provide favorable economic, environmental, and societal impacts, and address stakeholder concerns.

A 1997 graduate of Oregon State University with a doctoral degree in civil and environmental engineering, Mark has over 25 years of planning, engineering, and construction experience in water resources and environmental management for state and local governments, federal agencies, Tribal Nations, NGOs, and private sector clients throughout the United States.

When thinking about water quality, many people probably think about individual pesticides or antibiotics that they heard about in the news. The truth is, there are hundreds, likely millions, of chemicals present in most surface water samples. These chemicals might seem like a random assortment of molecules, but they are a chemical record, or a receipt, of all the biological, chemical, and physical processes that are occurring within a system. When people disturb the land, it leaves a chemical signature in the water. When salmon spawn in the rivers, it leaves a chemical signature in the water. Whether processes occur on land or in the water, our surface waters are libraries of chemical information. If we can decode the chemical signatures in a water sample, we can theoretically collect data on anything and everything that occurs upstream. The challenge is decoding the chemical signatures present. This work has implications for understanding human and ecosystem health and provides a glimpse into how nature will respond to climate change.

With increasing water shortages, many agricultural producers are looking to reclaimed water for irrigation.

This lecture discusses a study that explores the feasibility of a new process called electrodialysis-forward osmosis. The goal of the research was to recover nutrients and clean water from anaerobic digester effluent and to safely use it to help grow food crops, specifically lettuce and kale, through hydroponic production.

Impressively, the treatment achieved high nutrient recovery rates and reclaimed up to 74% of clean water. Additionally, the hybrid ED-FO process captured 76-98% of heavy metals and 83% of total organic carbon in the residual waste stream.

Both ED and FO demonstrated low-fouling potential. The economic analysis indicated that the hybrid ED-FO process is promising for scalable implementation, making it highly attractive in terms of resource recovery, waste footprint reduction, and water quality enhancement.

Lithium extraction is a vital piece in the shift toward global electrification. Yet traditional methods are slow, resource-heavy, and yield low results. Our innovative approach uses an advanced evaporation process to concentrate lithium ions from high-salinity brines efficiently, reducing lithium loss and preventing fouling. We've made significant enhancements to industrial brine concentration methods, incorporating cutting-edge technology in multiphase flow and transport phenomena.

A key element is our machine learning-based system design and control. It uses an artificial intelligence “digital twin” in the humidification-dehumidification (HDH) cycle, which captures data patterns and understands the system's sensitivity to various parameters. This model optimizes throughput with minimal trial and error, making design parameter changes and maximizing performance cost-effectively.

Conservation planning on watershed landscapes relies on nature‑based solutions to address water quality, flooding, drought, and climate challenges. Yet implementing practices like wetlands, riparian buffers, and vegetated filter areas involves significant uncertainty—from environmental variability to human behavior and infrastructure constraints. These uncertainties can be difficult for stakeholders to interpret, which often affects decision‑making in watershed communities. This presentation explores how visualizing uncertainty can improve communication, strengthen stakeholder understanding, and support more effective, timely decisions about conservation actions aimed at reducing flood risk.

The presentation will discuss Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) as a crucial tool for managing water resources in the face of climate change. It highlights drywells as a promising solution to overcome challenges associated with traditional MAR techniques. Drywells offer efficient groundwater recharge over a large area, bypassing surface obstacles and minimizing water loss. They present a cost-effective and sustainable approach to address water scarcity and enhance water resilience in diverse environments.

2023 Oregon State Engineering Faculty Lecture and Q&A: "Neuro-Prtheses for Amputees and Patients with Spinal Cord Injuries

2023 Oregon State Engineering Faculty Lecture and Q&A: "What it Takes to Take Down a Dam"

2023 Oregon State Engineering Faculty Lecture and Q&A: "Antibiotic Resistance from Wastewater to Agricultural Soils"

2023 Oregon State Engineering Faculty Lecture and Q&A: "Decsion Making for Marine Robotics"