At the Lauritzen Channel in Richmond, Dick Luthy (left) collects sediment with Stanford postdoctoral researcher David Werner (center) and graduate student Jeanne Tomaszewski (right). “We got a lesson from nature when we saw that things like charcoal were already there,” Luthy says.

Water engineer Luthy takes CEE chair at Stanford

“It doesn’t have the bustle of Sproul Plaza,” says Dick Luthy (B.S.’67 ChemE; M.S.’74, Ph.D.’76 CEE), “but the tranquil Stanford campus belies its exhilarating intellectual energy.”

After a youth spent in Palo Alto, three Berkeley Engineering degrees, and 24 years at Carnegie Mellon, Dick Luthy returned to his Bay Area roots in 1999 when he was recruited to Stanford, where he became CEE chair last fall.

“Stanford gave me the opportunity to do broad interdisciplinary research at the intersection of biology, geology, and industry,” he says.

His work focuses on physical processes and aquatic chemistry in treating waste and remediating contaminated sediment, or, as he calls it, “making the bay safe for fish and humans.” His primary project uses clams as bioindicators for DDT and PCBs in San Francisco Bay sediment. When the clams feed on the mud, the toxins accumulate in their fat and move up through the food chain. Contaminated areas can be treated cheaply with activated carbon, which Luthy and his students learned would stabilize the toxins and reduce their bioavailability. Only the top one or two feet, where the clams and worms live, need to be treated.

“Dredging—the historic way of dealing with this—doesn’t solve the problem,” Luthy says. “It’s expensive, it destroys the ecosystem, and then you have to dispose of the mud somewhere.” Luthy’s research showed that the new treatment, already used to purify water, would also work in bay sediment.

As an undergrad studying chemical engineering, Luthy balked at this career choice after spending a summer making 200 tons of ammonia every day. He had always loved the water and, in 1969, joined the U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Corps in an effort to avoid the draft. It worked. Rather than going off to Vietnam, he ended up in Southern California, working in ocean engineering and scuba diving off the Santa Barbara coast.

“It was 1970, the year of the first Earth Day,” Luthy says. “I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and my wife Mary and I got involved in recycling.” When he left the Navy, he returned to Berkeley on the GI Bill to study environmental engineering, and he credits his faculty mentors with helping him find a fitting career path.

This past year brought some new responsibilities as CEE chair. Luthy has worked with the faculty to put a new emphasis in the department and campuswide on engineering for sustainability. He intends to continue both his research and teaching and, as he has for the past five years, he will relish the opportunity to work a “Go Bears” cheer into his afternoon lecture the Friday before the Big Game.

“I have to be very diplomatic,” he says. “I root for Stanford, but I pray for Cal.”

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