Led by Charley Driscoll, EMPOWER is a team of over 50 people, including the leadership team, affiliated faculty, staff, graduate students, and external advisors. Browse our full directory below, which includes the leadership team and our graduate student trainees, or check out the information about our affiliated faculty and external advisors.
Charles Driscoll
EMPOWER Program Director & University Professor of Environmental Systems and Distinguished Professor
EMPOWER PI Charley Driscoll’s teaching and research interests are in the area of environmental chemistry, biogeochemistry and water quality modeling. He has initiated a number of research projects and used a variety of approaches to study the biogeochemistry of forest, wetland, freshwater and coastal ecosystems, including field investigations, laboratory studies, long-term field measurements, whole-ecosystem manipulation studies, and the development and application of models.…
Chris Johnson
Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering
Johnson is involved in a number of research projects in the broad area of environmental chemistry. He has ongoing research interests in the fate of trace metals (Pb, Zn, Cu, Ni) in forest soils and landscapes; the effects of clear-cut logging on soils and drainage waters; and the changing acid-base chemistry of soils historically affected by acid rain.…
Christopher Junium
Assistant Professor, Earth Sciences
Junium is a sedimentary and organic geochemist. His research focuses on the redox evolution of the Earth, specializing in biogeochemical cycling. He uses a range of geochemical tools, but focuses on the stable isotopes of nitrogen, carbon and sulfur, with a particular interest in compound-specific, stable isotope techniques. His research interests span the spectrum of geologic time from the Archean to modern systems.…
Christa Kelleher
Assistant Professor
Kelleher’s research primarily relies on computational simulations of models ranging from simple, conceptual representations to fully distributed and physically based frameworks to interrogate the relationships between water quality and quantity, and how this varies across different landscapes.
Christopher Scholz
Professor, Earth Sciences
Scholz’s research focuses on recovering records of past climate from lake basins, and on the sedimentary basin analysis of extensional systems, with emphasis on lacustrine basins. Current research efforts are concentrated on the large lakes of tropical Africa and the Finger Lakes of Central New York. Lake basins contain some of the highest quality archives of climate change on the continents, and new drill core records from the low-latitude lakes of Africa are revealing new details about the Pleistocene record of climate change.…
Donald Siegel
Emeritus Professor, Earth Sciences
Donald Siegel’s career spans over 40 years of doing research, consulting and teaching on problems related the aqueous geochemistry and hydrogeology of natural and contaminated waters. He earned his BS in Geology from the University of Rhode Island, his MS in Geology at Penn State University, and his PhD in Hydrogeology from the University of Minnesota.…
Donald Torrance
Director, Science Communications, and Associate Professor, Broadcast & Digital Journalism
Don Torrance is a documentary filmmaker, journalist and producer whose science journalism has appeared in broadcast, online and print outlets. Over a 30-year career he produced content for PBS; “Science Times,” the New York Times science television news magazine; National Public Radio; Science Magazine; and Nature Conservancy Magazine. He has produced several documentary films and environmental science television programs.…
Peter Wilcoxen
Professor, Public Administration and International Affairs
Peter J. Wilcoxen is an economist whose research focuses on the design and analysis of environmental and energy policies, especially those connected with national or international measures to address climate change. He is a professor in the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, co-director of the Brookings Climate and Energy Economics Project, and is a member of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board.…
Teng Zeng
Assistant Professsor, Civil & Environmental Engineering
Zeng’s research interests include the occurrence and fate of organic contaminants, formation and control of disinfection byproducts, public health implications of water reuse and environmental impacts of energy production. Zeng’s group combines controlled laboratory experiments with field work to study chemical processes occurring across diverse natural and engineered aquatic environments. His most recent work focuses on: (1) assessing transformation processes of organic contaminants and their interactions with dissolved and particulate constituents in natural waters and (2) characterizing sources of harmful byproducts to minimize their formation during drinking water purification and wastewater recycling to promote water sustainability while protecting public health.…