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Walter McDonald is a Ph.D. student, jointly advised by Drs. Dymond and Lohani, in the CEE program at Virginia Tech with a focus in water-resources engineering. He received a B.S. in civil engineering from Texas Tech University and an M.S. in civil engineering from Texas A&M University. He has had extensive training in hydrology and currently works in the LEWAS lab, where he conducts water-sustainability research. He also has developed and implemented curricula for introducing the LEWAS into freshman level courses at Virginia Western Community College and a senior level hydrology course at Virginia Tech.

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Dr. Randy Dymond is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. With degrees from Bucknell and Penn State, Dr. Dymond has more than 30 years of experience in academics, consulting, and software development. He has taught at Penn State and the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, and has been at Virginia Tech for 15 years. Dr. Dymond has published more than 50 refereed journal articles and proceedings papers, and been the principal or co-principal investigator for more than 110 research proposals from many diverse funding agencies. His research areas include urban stormwater modeling, low impact development, watershed and floodplain management, and sustainable land development. Dr. Dymond has had previous grants working with the Montgomery County public schools and the town of Blacksburg, Va., on stormwater research and public education. He teaches classes in GIS, land development, and water resources, and has won numerous teaching awards, at the departmental, college, and national levels.

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Dr. Vinod K Lohani is a professor in the engineering education department and an adjunct faculty member in the civil and environmental engineering department at Virginia Tech. His research interests are in the areas of sustainability, computer-supported research and learning systems, hydrology, and water resources. In a major ($1M+, NSF) curriculum reform and engineering education research project from 2004 to 2009, he led a team of engineering and education faculty to reform the engineering curriculum of an engineering department (Biological Systems Engineering) using Jerome Bruner’s spiral curriculum theory. Currently, Dr. Lohani leads an NSF/REU Site on ”interdisciplinary water sciences and engineering” which has graduated 56 excellent undergraduate researchers since 2007. This Site is renewed for the third cycle, which will be implemented during 2014-16. He also leads an NSF/TUES type I project in which a real-time environmental monitoring lab is being integrated into a freshman engineering course, a senior-level hydrology course at Virginia Tech, and a couple of courses at Virginia Western Community College, Roanoke, for enhancing water sustainability education. A member of ASCE and ASEE, he has published 70+ refereed publications.

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Daniel Brogan is a Ph.D. student in engineering education with B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering. He has completed several graduate courses in engineering education pertinent to this research. The key developer of the PIRMS, he leads the LEWAS lab development and implementation work. He has mentored two NSF/REU Site students in the LEWAS lab and assisted in the development and implementation of curricula for introducing the LEWAS at VWCC, including the development of pre- and post-test assessment questions. Additionally, he has a background in remote sensing, data analysis, and signal processing from the University of New Hampshire.

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Debarati Basu is a first year Ph.D. student in engineering education. She has B.Tech and M.Tech in computer science and engineering from West Bengal University of Technology. She has completed several graduate-level courses in the engineering education department and is engaged in developing a system with Raspberry Pi to collect data from the LEWAS sensors and store these in a database. A user will be able to access the data through an interactive user interface. She will be engaged in integrating the hardware and software components of this new system using programming languages such as Python, PHP, and SQL. She is mentoring an undergraduate student who is assisting her is developing the system.

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