Charles Driscoll
Professor of Environmental Systems Engineering,
Syracuse University

Dr. Charles T. Driscoll received his B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Maine in 1974. He received his M.S. in 1976 and Ph.D. in 1980 in Environmental Engineering from Cornell University. In 1979 he took a position on the faculty of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Syracuse University. Dr. Driscoll is currently University Professor of Environmental Systems Engineering and Director of the Center for Environmental Systems Engineering at Syracuse University. His teaching and research interests are in the area of environmental chemistry, biogeochemistry and environmental quality modeling.

Dr. Driscoll has received numerous awards and honors. In 1984, he was designated as a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation. He has provided expert testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Science Committee. He has been acknowledged by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) as one of the top 250 most highly cited researchers in two areas: environmental science and engineering. Dr. Driscoll has served on many local, national and international committees. He was a member of the National Research Council Panel on Process of Lake Acidification and the Committee of Air Quality Management. He is currently a member of the board of trustees of the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation and the Upstate Freshwater Institute.

A principal research focus has been the response of forest, aquatic and coastal ecosystems to disturbance, including air pollution (acid rain), land use change and elevated inputs of nutrients and mercury. Dr. Driscoll uses a variety of research approaches to study the effects of disturbance, including field investigations, laboratory studies, long-term field measurements, whole-ecosystem manipulation studies, and the development and application of models. Dr. Driscoll has authored or co-authored more that 250 peer-reviewed articles. He has had more than 70 funded research projects, most of these were obtained from competitive research programs such as the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency. He is currently the principal investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research project at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, New Hampshire.