Hazardous Substance Research Centers/South & Southwest

After 11 years as director of research of the hazardous waste/substance, EPA- sponsored, centers at LSU, Thibodeaux is now engaged full-time as a professor of chemical engineering. He is active in teaching, research and service and holds the title of Jesse Coates Professor in the College of Engineering. Teaching undergraduates is a large activity, and he routinely lectures undergraduates heat and mass transport class, guides experiments in the junior laboratory course and coordinates the senior research course. He is author of a textbook entitled Environmental Chemodynamics (Wiley, 1996) and offers a technical elective course each year of the same title. Professor Thibodeaux is a full member of the Graduate Faculty and guides a modest number of MS and Ph.D. students, graduating one or two yearly.

Chemodynamics, the study of the transport and fate of anthropogenic substances in the natural environment, is the subject of Dr. Thibodeaux's research. In general, the projects are concerned with physical/chemical processes and models that describe transport of chemicals near the natural interfaces: air-water, water-sediment, and soil-air. His research blends laboratory and field data with mathematical modeling to yield a better understanding of the environmental behavior of hazardous chemicals produced by the chemical process and other industries.

In an effort at emphasizing and producing works that have a present or near-term applicability, rather than long-term archival, he has ventured into field of using multimedia environmentals. One completed project, the result of a student MS thesis, tested model predictions of eight chemicals in the South Louisiana chemical corridor against monitoring data. A manuscript was produced; see Pederson etal. below. Another addresses environmental dredging from a multimedia perspective; see the ASCE periodical. It concerned with the multimedia chemical losses to air, water and sediment as a result of dredging contaminated sediment beds.