Angel Santiago Fernandez-Bou works on multidisciplinary projects to preserve resources and habitat for society and nature. His focus is in finding solutions for Biosystems challenges that require combinations of Engineering, Environmental, and Socioeconomic approaches. His research experience ranges from hydrology and waste water treatment, to soil greenhouse gas emissions (link to publications). He also works to democratize scientific knowledge by developing low-cost devices for environmental monitoring and by promoting STEM K-12 education. He co-created the nonprofit organization 4 Venir to teach advanced scientific topics to children to motivate them to pursue higher education, and he has coordinated tens of outreach programs with that purpose. He has experience in teaching higher education courses about Spatial Analysis and Modeling, Engineering Economic Analysis, Hydrology and Subsurface Hydrology, and Capstone Engineering Design.
Angel S. trilingual in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, holding a PhD in Environmental Systems from the University of California, Merced, a MSc in Biosystems Engineering and Water Resources from the Fluminense Federal University (Brazil), and a BEng in Agricultural Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain).
Research Interests:
Innovation in the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems, UC Merced
- Multi-objective analysis of complex socio-hydro-agro-economics models.
- Vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.
- Climate change resilience.
Carbon Balance, UC Merced and La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica
- Understanding the soil domain’s contribution to the rainforest carbon balance under the effects of dominant species.
Low-cost sensing devices, UC Merced
- I develop and fabricate sensing devices based on low-cost and open source hardware, for environmental monitoring. My focus is on devices for measuring CO2 emissions from soil, water and biomass.
Niche ecology modeling, UC Merced and La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica
- How ecosystem engineers can change the ecological niches where the leave, and modify ecosystem services.
Flow forecasting and energy load forecasting, FFU (Fluminense Federal University), Brazil
- Flow forecasting by coupling hydrological and global climate models at different time frames in large basins for energy forecasting. Developing a new semi-distributed hydrological model for low-monitoring regions.
Wastewater and leachate treatment, FFU / FRRJU (Rio de Janeiro Federal Rural University), Brazil.
- Using the PACT® process, originally developed for wastewater treatment, to treat landfill leachate.
