Dr. Billy Raseman recently defended his doctoral dissertation, graduating in Summer 2019. After graduation, he has accepted a position as Assistant Engineer at Hazen and Sawyer in Lakewood, CO working to bring intelligent water technologies to the drinking water, wastewater, and water reuse sectors. In Billy's thesis, he researched and developed modeling and optimization techniques to make drinking water treatment safer, more resilient, and cost-effective. His work is motivated by the increasing strain on the water sector due to population growth, aging infrastructure, climate change, and stringent regulations. Specifically, Billy developed a decision support tool that combines advances in stochastic water quality, water treatment modeling, multi-objective optimization, and visual analytics, to enhance treatment operations. In the process, Billy contributed to the USEPA Water Treatment Plant Model and managed the development of Parasol--an open source, interactive visualization library for multi-objective decision-making. Dr. Raseman had the following comments about his time at CU:
I learned to think about decision-making in a new light. Nearly every choice we make has tradeoffs--from buying a car to managing the Colorado River. With multi-objective optimization, we can fully understand and explore those tradeoffs and have an honest conversation about what we value. I'm excited to bring this paradigm to the drinking water sector and challenge the way we design and operate our treatment infrastructure.