The Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering Department is welcoming two new faculty members. Read on to see why we’re so excited about these talented new hires:
Meet Our Talented New Faculty Members
Assistant Professor Cresten Mansfeldt
Cresten Mansfeldt joined the department in August as an assistant professor. Mansfeldt comes from the Department of Environmental Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, where he was an FS8 Scientist specializing in biotransformation and microbial ecology.
Throughout his research career, Mansfeldt has operated at the interface of bioinformatics, bioproduction and bioremediation. He has focused his research efforts into areas relevant to human interaction with the environment including subsurface remediation of industrial solvents, microbial community dynamics of municipal bioprocesses, and photosynthetic production of value-added products. Strengthening the effectiveness of these functional endeavors requires developments in our core understanding and description of microbiology; therefore, he additionally utilizes advanced computational techniques to improve our ability to model and predict the assembly of microbial communities.
Mansfeldt received a bachelor’s in civil engineering from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in environmental engineering from Cornell University.
Assistant Professor Anthony Straub
Anthony Straub joined the Environmental Engineering Program in August and is rostered in civil, environmental and architectural engineering as an assistant professor. His appointment builds on the program’s expertise in water treatment processes and water sustainability.
Straub develops environmental technologies to address issues at the intersection of water and energy. He conducts work across scales, from nanomaterials design to laboratory-scale testing and system-level optimization. During his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed carbon-based electrically conductive materials for membrane applications. His doctoral work at Yale University focused on emerging membrane processes for power generation, and his research helped to develop a new technology that uses nanoporous membranes to generate power from low-grade heat. Straub plans to create a research program at CU Boulder that leverages his expertise in membrane science, energy analysis and materials engineering to develop advanced water treatment technologies.
Straub holds PhD, MS and MPhil degrees in chemical and environmental engineering from Yale, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He obtained his BS in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also received the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct research at the MIT in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.