Editor’s Note

I am pleased to introduce a new feature for the Journal of Environmental Engineering. Over the past few years, our Editorial Board has been considering various ways to make the Journal more appealing to our readers. One concept that we have decided to pursue is the publication of invited papers. This issue presents the first of these papers. The invited paper is intended to provide an opportunity for an author along with his/her colleagues to publish a significant piece of work. That work may be recent, or it may be the culmination of many years of research. Invited papers are subject to the same or perhaps an even more rigorous peer review process than that afforded to any other technical paper that appears in the Journal. Due to the significance and timeliness of the work, it is our intention to expedite the publication process in these situations.

Our ability to get this program going is due to the efforts of Alan Rabideau who volunteered to serve as the first invited papers editor for the Journal. I am sure he engaged in a bit of arm-twisting to get this off the ground. In the coming months you will see the fruits of his labor. Thank you Alan!

An invited paper will not appear in every issue of the Journal. Furthermore, there will never be more than one invited paper in any one issue. We are looking for authors who are interested in producing high-quality manuscripts in short order. I invite your suggestions for future invited papers.

This first invited paper is authored by John Loperfido, Craig Just, and Jerry Schnoor. I won’t attempt to summarize it; the abstract and paper speak for themselves. But I will provide you with a bit of background for the authors.

John Loperfido graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2004 with a B.S. in civil engineering. In the Fall of 2004 he began work as a graduate research assistant investigating water sensing in the Clear Creek testbed for the NSF WATERS Network proposal under Jerry Schnoor at the University of Iowa. Since then he has presented his work at national conferences including EWRI’s World Environmental and Water Resources Congress and the AGU Fall Meeting. He anticipates graduating in the summer of 2009 with a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering. He was recently awarded a Mendenhall Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to work with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Craig Just is an adjunct assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and associate faculty research engineer at IIHR—Hydroscience and Engineering at the University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D. in 2001. Dr. Just received the university’s 2008 President and Provost Award For Teaching Excellence, and continues to conduct research in the areas of phytoremediation of explosives, water quality and cyberinfrastructure, fate determination of contaminants during wastewater treatment, and poverty reduction and community building in poorer countries such as Guatemala, Mexico, and Haiti.

Jerry Schnoor is the Allen S. Henry Chair in Engineering and codirector of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa. Jerry is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (elected in 1999) for his research using mathematical models in science policy decisions. He chaired the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ORD Board of Scientific Counselors from 2000 to 2004, and is a member of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences (NAEHS) Council. Jerry is considered one of the founding fathers of phytoremediation, using plants to help clean the environment. He serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Science and Technology. His other research interests include water quality modeling, environmental observatories, sustainability, and global change.

It is our pleasure to present the work of these fine scholars.