Noel Urban

Noel R. Urban is a professor of environmental engineering at Michigan Technological University (MTU) and director of the Michigan Tech Center for Water and Society. He has a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Syracuse University (1979), a B.A. in Russian Language and Culture from Syracuse University (1980), and M.S. and Ph.D. (1987) degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota. Urban worked for four years as a post-doctoral fellow at EAWAG, the Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology. He then spent a year in Bayreuth, Germany as a Humboldt Fellow before taking a position at Michigan Technological University.

Urban is a biogeochemist who works primarily in lake and wetland environments. He teaches environmental chemistry and surface water quality courses in the Environmental Engineering program at Michigan Technological University, and has published extensively on the biogeochemistry of wetlands, small lakes and the Great Lakes. He currently has research projects dealing with remediation of lakes and streams impacted by mining wastes, processing of mercury and organic contaminants within large and small lakes, and carbon cycling in the Great Lakes. Much of this research is at the interface of science and policy. Funding for recent work has come from NSF, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and Michigan Sea Grant.