Dr. Melissa Gloekler

Dr. Gloekler is an Environmental Engineer in the RPS OS team in South Kingston, RI. She specializes in contaminant modeling in 3D water environments, with focuses on oil spill fate and trajectory modeling, sediment dispersion modeling, and water quality modeling. Her modeling work supports Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), project engineering plans, pipeline consequence analyses, Construction and Operations Plans (COPs) for offshore development projects, and similar applications. She has published several reports and peer-reviewed papers on modeling studies and contaminant fate and transport in these fields. Her broad academic expertise in fluid mechanics, chemistry, sediment transport processes, and materials science allows her to assess complex contaminant transport issues and develop new algorithms to be implemented in RPS’s modeling systems (including the oil model, SIMAP). Dr. Gloekler is passionate about finding science-based solutions to problems at the intersection of human enterprise and the natural world.

Dr. Gloekler graduated from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) with a B.S. in Environmental Engineering – Municipal Processes. Shortly after graduating she became a certified Engineer in Training (EIT) and began her graduate studies at UNH, where she received a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering, focused on the mechanisms controlling the transport of sunken oil in marine and riverine environments.