Alexandria B. Boehm, PhD
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor in Environmental Studies
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Department of Oceans · Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment
Sugden Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Faculty Fellow, Center for Innovation in Global Health
Stanford University, Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy Building
+1 650-724-9128 · aboehm@stanford.edu
I am interested in pathogens in the environment including their sources, fate, and transport in natural and engineered systems. I am interested in understanding how pathogens are transmitted to humans through contact with water, feces, and contaminated surfaces. My research is focused on key problems in both high-income and low- and middle-income countries with the overarching goal of designing and testing novel interventions and technologies for reducing the burden of disease.
I am also interested broadly in coastal water quality, where my work addresses the sources, transformation, transport, and ecology of biocolloids — specifically fecal indicator organisms, DNA, pathogens, and phytoplankton — as well as the sources and fate of nitrogen. This knowledge is crucial to formulating new management policies and engineering practices that protect human and ecosystem health at the coastal margins.
Details of projects can be found here.
Environmental science and engineering, by its very nature, is multi-disciplinary. In order to be successful, students must be grounded in fundamental sciences and also have the know-how to apply the fundamentals to real, complex problems. Because there are also regulatory, political, and social components to real environmental problems, the most successful environmental science and engineering problem-solvers will have a background in these broader domains as well.
With these challenges in mind, I have developed several multi-disciplinary classes that aim to supply the fundamentals for applied environmental problem solving: CEE 41Q: Clean Water Now! Urban Water Conflicts, CEE 175A/275A: California Coast: Science, Policy, and Law, CEE 272: Coastal Contaminants, CEE 271M: Transport Phenomena, and CEE 274P: Environmental Health Microbiology Lab. I co-teach CEE 175A/275A with a law professor (Deborah Sivas); the class is popular with students from the Law School, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Earth Systems Science, and was even featured on Jeopardy. For more, see the courses page.
The Boehm Research Group, as imagined by the lab.