Profile: Hydrology Program

New Mexico Tech's Hydrology Program is a "David among Goliaths"

Also see the Hydrology Program's website.

SOCORRO, N.M., May 23, 1997 -- On lists of top schools in national college rankings, often including with huge universities with much larger student enrollments, appears the name of a much smaller university. New Mexico Tech's highly ranked hydrology program surely could be characterized as a "David among Goliaths."

The illustrious graduate program at the diminutive state-supported research university was once again rated among the best in the nation in the 1997 U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings of graduate schools.

The New Mexico Tech hydrology program was tied with mega-university Penn State as the nation's fourth-best in the specialty area of hydrogeology, behind other enormous and eminent schools such as the University of Arizona, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Stanford University.

In last year's survey and analysis conducted by U.S. News & World Report, New Mexico Tech's graduate program in hydrology also was ranked as the country's fourth-best in its field.

So, how does a small college in the middle of the New Mexico desert, with a typical enrollment hovering around 1,400 students, attain such an enviable position within U.S. academia?

"With longtime, adequate support, even a small New Mexico school can be competitive--in carefully selected areas--with some of the best universities in the country," answers Fred M. Phillips, professor of hydrology and chairman of Tech's Earth and environmental science department, under whose tutelage the hydrology program falls.

The initial financial support which started up the hydrology program came in 1955 from New Mexico Tech's Geophysical Research Center (GRC). In fact, half of the money currently paid out in salaries to the five full-time faculty members of the hydrology program still is provided by the state-funded GRC.

"That original, focused support Tech gave the program in the early years allowed the university to bring in some of best-known people in what was then a relatively new field of study," relates Robert S. Bowman, professor of hydrology and current director of the hydrology program at New Mexico Tech. "The first two directors of the Tech hydrology program, for instance, were Mahdi Hantush and Charles E. Jacob, recognized as the founders of modern well hydraulics. They are prime examples of world-class researchers who already had made fundamental contributions to the science of hydrology even before coming to Tech and continued to do so during their stays here."

Under the guidance of Hantush, the fledgling hydrology program at New Mexico Tech emerged as one of the first such graduate programs offered in the nation.

Hantush proved to be as excellent a teacher as he was a researcher, and the little hydrology program in the middle of the New Mexico desert soon found itself attracting graduate students from around the world.

Not surprisingly, some of the classic papers in the field of hydrology were written in Socorro by Hantush, Jacob, and others who followed, including Hantush's seminal work in defining how groundwater responds to wells being pumped.

Hantush's influence in the field extended way beyond the ten or more years he spent in hydrology labs and classrooms at New Mexico Tech: To this day, it remains a difficult task to find a recent textbook on groundwater which does not refer extensively to his research.

Also widely cited are research studies conducted in the 1970s by faculty members Vijay Singh and Peter Huyakorn, under the guidance of hydrology program director Lynn Gelhar.

Gelhar also teamed up back then with mathematician Allan Gutjahr, to lead the way in cutting-edge research in the specialty areas of stochastic groundwater hydrology and pollutant transport.

The current faculty in New Mexico Tech's hydrology program also continue to build on the outstanding reputation garnered for the program by their predecessors.

Phillips, for example, pioneered a more accurate method of dating geological landforms and groundwater by measuring the accumulation of chlorine-36, a naturally occurring radioactive element. His research work using the chlorine-36 dating method has become crucial to other geoscientists striving to understand past global-scale climate changes.

Recognition of Phillips's landmark research in paleohydrology studies by his peers is demonstrated by his numerous national and international awards, including the prestigious F. W. Clarke Medal from the Geochemical Society.

John Wilson, who served as the program's director prior to Bowman, is a leader in the specialty fields of flow and transport behavior in porous media, including multiphase flow and colloid and bacteria movement. His work also has received widespread recognition, most recently in 1996 when he received the O. E. Meinzer Award from the Geological Society of America--the highest individual honor attainable in the field of hydrogeology.

In fact, all of the faculty members in Tech's hydrology program are active researchers whose studies are often at the cutting edge of groundwater science.

Bowman is a recognized expert on transport of agricultural chemicals to groundwater and is the developer of an innovative method which uses treated zeolites as barriers to trap pollutants in groundwater.

Jan Hendrickx's research deals with the hydrological processes which occur in the vadose zone, which largely determine the vulnerability of groundwater to contamination and the amount of fresh water available for aquifer recharge. Most recently, his work assessing salinity of soils in shallow groundwater has helped direct revegetation efforts at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge and New Mexico pueblos faced with similar soil-salinity problems.

The hydrology program's newest faculty member, Brian McPherson, lists broad research interests, including groundwater geology/hydrogeology, numerical modeling of hydrogeologic, thermal, and geologic processes, and the measurement and study of geophysical and petrophysical properties of rocks.

And, geophysicist Gerardo Gross, an emeritus professor at New Mexico Tech, always has played an active role in Tech's hydrology program since the late 1960s. His early groundbreaking efforts at Tech in using tritium as a natural tracer in hydrologic analyses also played a large part in attracting other leading hydrologists to New Mexico Tech.

"Top people in the field were willing to come here simply because several prominent people had been here before them," Bowman points out. "Many continue to come here just to follow in Mahdi Hantush's footsteps."

Many of the program's graduates--too many to mention in the scope of this article--also have gone on to make essential contributions in hydrology in their positions in academia, state and federal regulatory agencies, geotechnical and geohydrologic consulting firms, and research organizations throughout the world.

"In the 1996-97 academic year, the hydrology program enrollment was 32 graduate students working toward master of science or doctorate degrees," Bowman notes. "Several of these graduate students were supported by the GRC, while 25 others were supported by external grants and contracts, teaching assistantships, or fellowships."

"On the average, we probably graduate anywhere between four and eight students in our graduate program each year," Phillips adds, "and a large proportion of our program's graduates end up staying in New Mexico, working for industry, consulting firms, and government agencies and facilities."

In addition to "regular" graduate students, Tech undergraduates also are allowed the unique opportunity of enrolling in the hydrology program's distinctive "five-year, dual-degree" program.

Students opting for the five-year program are allowed to pursue a bachelor of science degree in any of Tech's various science or engineering offerings, while at the same time working to complete requirements for a master of science degree in hydrology--dual degrees in five years.

So, it seems that its long history of success coupled with continued innovation and excellence in teaching and applied and basic research have propelled the small hydrology program at New Mexico Tech to being recognized among the dozens of programs now being offered as "one of the best in the nation."

"That . . . and a history of support from the state," Phillips further emphasizes. "New Mexico Tech's hydrology program has received modest, but consistent, funding for over 40 years now, and the consistency of the funding provided by the state has been instrumental in its success.

"I might also point out that the hydrology program has done well for the state in return. It always has brought in a lot more research money than the amount the state pays out in salaries," Phillips asserts.

As an example, Phillips cites budget figures from 1995, in which the hydrology program is shown to have brought in over $570,000 in research grants--more than double its salary base.

"Can Tech's hydrology program serve as a model for other programs to be successful?," Phillips rhetorically asks. "Yes, definitely yes."

-NMT-