“The environment is incredibly complex, and our grasp of it is shifting every day,” says CEE PhD student Dan Prendergast. “I liked the idea of chasing a life in environmental engineering, because it’s application-based. I can, right now as a student, produce something tangible and impactful in all of my work.” Prendergast works in Parsons Laboratory to develop and deploy passive samplers in Seattle’s Lower Duwamish Waterway to devise means to identify the source(s) of contaminants like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in complex environments. With less than two years to go, the fourth-year PhD candidate’s project hinges on a fusion of fieldwork, lab analysis and computer simulation. Read his profile here.