Faculty profile: Katherine McMahon

For new Civil and Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor Katherine (Trina) McMahon, the choice of becoming an engineering professor was fairly simple. All she had to do was recall the days she spent at her father's office on the engineering campus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

While her father, Peter Sauer, worked nights and weekends at his office as an electrical engineering professor, McMahon spent her time playing on computers and driving remote-controlled cars up and down the hallways.

"I used to have this notion that my dad spent so much time at his office because he wanted to be there all the time," she said. "I had this notion that it was fun."

McMahon liked the Illinois campus setting so much she enrolled there, completing her BS (1995) and MS (1997) degrees before moving to the University of California at Berkeley for her PhD (2002). But when she chose her field, she declined to follow her father's footsteps and instead opted for civil and environmental engineering.

"I guess I was a raving tree-hugger when I went to college," she said.

Her research interests coincide with an emerging field of environmental engineering — manipulating bacteria and other biological material to treat wastewater. As McMahon explains it, engineers have been using bacteria in wastewater treatment plants for more than a century. But only recently have researchers looked at ways to manipulate bacteria at the molecular level to treat wastewater more effectively. For instance, environmental engineers are studying ways to keep "good" bacteria around to degrade pollutants, while at the same time getting rid of "bad" bacteria that may have residual harmful effects.

"The science of wastewater treatment has lagged behind the engineering of treatment plants," said McMahon, who joined the department last fall. "The improvements in treating wastewater will come through the science."

In addition, McMahon said she is researching nutrient cycling, a key issue in the preservation and health of wetlands, and looking at the impact that antibiotics — used in the feed of most farm animals — have when they are recycled into plants. She plans to work closely with Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate Professor Dan Noguera, who she met as an undergraduate at Illinois while Noguera was a graduate student there. She was also drawn to UW-Madison because of its bacteriology and biochemistry departments, which conduct research into bacteria and other fields that impact environmental engineering.

"They have a world-class reputation," she said of the work done in the departments.