U.S. State Department Scientist, CSU Alumnus to Headline University’s World Water Day Event on Tuesday, March 22

Note to Reporters: A photo of Douglas D. Walker is available with the news release at http://news.colostate.edu.

Colorado State University alumnus Douglas D. Walker, a U.S. State Department Diplomacy Fellow, will deliver the keynote address at World Water Day at Colorado State University on Tuesday, March 22.

Walker will speak at 6 p.m. in the Lory Student Center West Ballroom.

International World Water Day is held annually on March 22 to highlight the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. At Colorado State, events will include student and community booths on water-related topics – including a group from Lesher Middle School – from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the Lory Student Center Plaza.

Sponsoring the events at Colorado State are the university’s Parents Fund and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Walker is a Desk Officer for the Offices of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Bureau of South and Central Asia. He has been appointed U.S. State Department as Diplomacy Fellow for 2010 while on leave from the Illinois State Water Survey.

He earned his bachelor’s in watershed science, his master’s in civil engineering and his doctoral degree in agricultural engineering, all from Colorado State. Walker is a registered professional hydrologist, author or co-author of more than 60 publications and has more than 25 years experience conducting groundwater studies and evaluating nuclear fuel and waste repositories in Sweden, Japan and the United States.

He was a member of the Peer Review Panel for studies of contamination resulting from underground nuclear weapons tests at the Nevada Test Site. He has been a Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; an associate editor of the journal, Ground Water; a member of the ASCE-EWRI committee on Ground Water Quality; and a member of the American Geophysical Union Groundwater Technical Committee. He has served with the American Red Cross for nearly a decade in support of six national-level disaster relief operations.

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