News

Dec 26, 2002 - McMahon Joins Environmental Engineering Faculty

The environmental science and engineering program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison is pleased to announce that Dr. Trina McMahon joined the faculty of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department as an Assistant Professor in January 2003.  Dr. McMahon’s research focuses on the application of molecular biology and biochemical engineering to study microbial communities in natural and engineered ecosystems. She earned a B.S. (1995) in Civil Engineering and a M. S. (1997) in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  More recently, she received her Ph.D. (2002) from the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with Professors David Jenkins (Environmental Engineering) and Jay Keasling (Chemical Engineering) on the characterization of polyphosphate kinase genes found in wastewater treatment ecosystems performing biological phosphorus removal.  During her graduate career, she was a NSF Graduate Fellow and a US EPA Science to Achieve Results Fellow. Dr. McMahon hopes to continue studying the biochemistry of microbes living in wastewater treatment systems, while also developing research projects in the areas of environmental genomics and microbial stress response. Dr. McMahon’s arrival at the University of Wisconsin – Madison greatly increases our program’s strength in environmental biotechnology and biological processes, and nicely complements other focus areas of the program, such as advanced treatment technologies, environmental chemistry, and water quality.