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Water engineer Luthy
takes CEE chair at Stanford
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At
the Lauritzen Channel in Richmond, Dick Luthy (left) collects
sediment with Stanford postdoctoral researcher David Werner
(center) and graduate student Jeanne Tomaszewski (right).
“We got a lesson from nature when we saw that things
like charcoal were already there,” Luthy says.
PHOTO COURTESY DICK LUTHY |
“It doesn’t have the bustle of Sproul Plaza,”
says Dick Luthy (B.S.’67 ChemE; M.S.’74, Ph.D.’76
CEE), “but the tranquil Stanford campus belies its exhilarating
intellectual energy.”
After a youth spent in Palo Alto, three Berkeley Engineering degrees,
and 24 years at Carnegie Mellon, Dick Luthy returned to his Bay
Area roots in 1999 when he was recruited to Stanford, where he
became CEE chair last fall.
“Stanford gave me the opportunity to do broad interdisciplinary
research at the intersection of biology, geology, and industry,”
he says. His work focuses on physical processes and aquatic chemistry
in treating waste and remediating contaminated sediment, or, as
he calls it, “making the bay safe for fish and humans.”
His primary project uses clams as bioindicators for DDT and PCBs
in San Francisco Bay sediment. When the clams feed on the mud,
the toxins accumulate in their fat and move up through the food
chain. Contaminated areas can be treated cheaply with activated
carbon, which Luthy and his students learned would stabilize the
toxins and reduce their bioavailability. Only the top one or two
feet, where the clams and worms live, need to be treated.
“Dredging—the historic way of dealing with this—doesn’t
solve the problem,” Luthy says. “It’s expensive,
it destroys the ecosystem, and then you have to dispose of the
mud somewhere.” Luthy’s research showed that the new
treatment, already used to purify water, would also work in bay
sediment.
As an undergrad studying chemical engineering, Luthy balked at
this career choice after spending a summer making 200 tons of
ammonia every day. He had always loved the water and, in 1969,
joined the U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Corps in an effort to avoid
the draft. It worked. Rather than going off to Vietnam, he ended
up in Southern California, working in ocean engineering and scuba
diving off the Santa Barbara coast.
“It was 1970, the year of the first Earth Day,” Luthy
says. “I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and my
wife Mary and I got involved in recycling.” When he left
the Navy, he returned to Berkeley on the GI Bill to study environmental
engineering, and he credits his faculty mentors with helping him
find a fitting career path.
This past year brought some new responsibilities as CEE chair.
Luthy has worked with the faculty to put a new emphasis in the
department and campuswide on engineering for sustainability. He
intends to continue both his research and teaching and, as he
has for the past five years, he will relish the opportunity to
work a “Go Bears” cheer into his afternoon lecture
the Friday before the Big Game.
“I have to be very diplomatic,” he says. “I
root for Stanford, but I pray for Cal.”
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