Bringing safe water to the table

Jennifer Pocock — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 21:55:22 +0000

Bringing safe water to the table Jennifer Pocock Tue, 09/30/2025 - 17:55

New �鶹��Ƶ researcher goes beyond engineering to connect communities.

Smith visits a well with a handpump in Apac district, Uganda with colleague Paska Anyapo Sizzela, Senior Sanitation Officer for International Lifeline Fund. Photo by James Winter

Fresh water is not just the foundation of life; it’s also at the center of every society. From ancient watering holes that brought all the animals to the yard to municipal systems that bring refreshment from tap-to-glass, water connects us all.

Daniel Smith is a water treatment engineering expert who advocates for clean water and sanitation in both large municipalities and tiny rural communities. The newly appointed assistant professor of environmental engineering and water resources in the Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering brings experience working with organizations in Honduras, Uganda, Bangladesh, and across the United States—just to name a few.

What makes him really interesting, though, is how he blends social sciences with his engineering research. He's implemented research on a phenomenon called social capital, which is a way to measure how much a community trusts—or distrusts—one another and its effect on infrastructure management. “That was an amazing concept to me as an engineer.”

In communities with high social capital, he found, it's easy to get widespread buy-in for community-managed infrastructure. “They tend to raise more money, have better communication with less misinformation, and better implement training programs,” he said.

The projects are easier to get off the ground, gain trust and enthusiasm, and create a “virtuous circle” where the buy-in creates better living situations, which raises social capital overall, and allows for openness to further improvements.

In communities with low social capital, however, communication is difficult, projects are hard to get going, and a vicious cycle starts, which leads to even less trust and buy-in overall (and poorer water quality). In those cases, he's worked on communication methods to help raise community trust.

As a new face in civil and environmental engineering, Smith is still in the process of setting up his water quality lab at the Potomac Science Center. When it’s finished, he will bring his nonprofit and research collaborations with water utilities in the Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., area and nonprofit organizations, such as AguaClara Reach in Honduras and International Lifeline Fund in Uganda, to George �鶹��Ƶ.

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Daniel W. Smith

Learn about Sustainability at George �鶹��Ƶ

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water quality

clean water

Potomac Science Center

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�鶹��Ƶ receives NSF grant for Conservation Incentives and the Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Water Sustainability

Rena Malai — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 14:02:38 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ receives NSF grant for Conservation Incentives and the Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Water Sustainability Rena Malai Thu, 12/09/2021 - 09:02

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Shima Mohebbi

Clean water is a vital component of life, and without it, human existence as it’s known today would quickly cease. This is largely why water conservation is an important and ever- growing concern, particularly when it comes to natural resources, like rivers, and the allocation and management of fresh water resources.

Shima Mohebbi, assistant professor in the College of Engineering and Computing at �鶹��Ƶ, together with researchers from the University of Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Clark University, Oklahoma State University, and Florida International University, received a nearly $1.6 million project grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Conservation Incentives and the Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Water Sustainability.

Although this project focuses on the Red River, the second-largest basin located in the southern part of the United States, Mohebbi says the solutions and lessons gained throughout are transferable to water systems around the world.

“Water resource management is a complex problem that is affected by water scarcity, the impact of climate change on water supplies, and decision-makers’ behavior (behind water conservation policies),” Mohebbi says. “Capturing the complex feedback between social and environmental systems over time can raise new fundamental questions in the field of Operations Research and Systems Engineering. This in turn can help with further understanding the intricacies behind water resource management and incentives allocation."

Under this grant, Mohebbi will develop novel game theory models to understand how conflicts and propensities for cooperative behavior among water users — including farmers — might vary over time across the river network.

The project will start in January 2022 and will run for five years. Working alongside colleagues from fields including geography and environmental sustainability, ecology, and agricultural engineering, Mohebbi says the project’s end goal is to demonstrate how voluntary conservation incentives—like offering subsidies to water users—could potentially be used to achieve water sustainability.

"Along with my student researchers, we will work closely with collaborators, use data collected on user’s belief and behavior, formulate the game theory models, and discover novel and fair solutions around water conservation incentive schemes,” Mohebbi says.

Additionally, Mohebbi is working on another NSF-funded project for Integrative Decision Making Framework to Enhance the Resiliency of Interdependent Critical Infrastructures. This targets water, transportation, and cyber infrastructures.

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clean water

Bringing safe water to the table

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�鶹��Ƶ receives NSF grant for Conservation Incentives and the Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Water Sustainability

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