Profile

Multi-disciplined environmental engineer with special interests in water and wastewater engineering, environmental management and environmental policy. Bilingual English/Hungarian with advanced knowledge of French and German.

Education

Master of science(with Honours) University of California, Berkeley

Graduated with honours in December 2002 with a degree of Master of Science in Environmental Engineering Science. Special interest in sustainable development. Coursework includes technologies for sustainable societies, air quality engineering, environmental management systems, civil systems and the environment, environmental data analysis, river basin management, wastewater and water treatment, water chemistry.

Bachelor of Arts(magna cum laude in Chemistry) Harvard University

Graduated magna cum laude in June 2000 with a B.A. in Chemistry. Language citation in German.

Summer Programme Bermuda Biological Station for Research

Completed Marine Ecotoxicology and Human Health and the Ocean courses. Experience with various analytical techniques (GC/MS, IR, NMR), toxicology assays and field sampling techniques.

Work experience

Publications

Stec, Stephen et. al. " Transboundary Environmental Governance and the Baia Mare Cyanide Spill" Review of Central and East European Law 2001 No. 4, 639-691.

The man behind the curtain: the changing and very personal nature of environmental decision making in CEE. Co-author of a paper presented at the conference "Environment and Sustainable Development in the New Central Europe: Austria and its Neighbors" University of Minnesota, September 2002.

Bochniarz, Zbigniew ed. The Environment and Sustainable Development in the New Central Europe. Principal author of a chapter on the Tisza/Tisa transboundary cyanide pollution incident. To be published by Berghahn Books, June 2006.

Honours and Awards

Skills and Activities

Hobbies: I have been a passionate stamp collector since age 12 and have been participating in national and international exhibits since 2001. I have also been interested in astronomy and cosmology since early childhood. Whenever I have the opportunity, I enjoy outdoor activities, such as riding a bicycle and mountain hiking.

Additional Information

M.S. Coursework:

Environmental Physical-Chemical Processes

Fundamental concepts of physical-chemical processes that affect water quality in natural and engineered environmental systems. Focus is on developing a qualitative understanding of mechanisms as well as quantitative tools to describe, predict, and control the behavior of physical-chemical processes. Topics included reactor hydraulics and reaction kinetics, gas transfer, adsorption, particle characteristics, flocculation, gravitational separations, filtration, membranes, and disinfection.

Water Quality Engineering

Principles and engineering applications of technical processes for water and wastewater treatment, and water reclamation: separation and transformation technologies (sedimentation, membrane processes, oxidation, biodegradation, activated sludge, biofilm reactors, biological treatment of drinking water, solids processing, disinfection). Application of fundamental principles for process analysis and design with a focus on commonalities in applications across industry. Regulatory process and drivers.

Air Quality Engineering

Quantitative overview of the characterization and control of air pollution problems. Summary of fundamental chemical and physical processes governing pollutant behavior. Analysis of key elements of the air pollution system: sources and control techniques, atmospheric transformation, atmospheric transport, modeling, and air quality management.

Civil Systems and the Environment

Methods and tools for economic and environmental analysis of civil engineering systems. Focus on construction, transportation, and operation, and maintenance of the built infrastructure. Life-cycle planning, design, costing, financing, and environmental assessment. Industrial ecology, design for environment, pollution prevention, external costs. Models and software tools for life-cycle economic and environmental inventory, impact, and improvement analysis of civil engineering systems. Field-trips to local landfill site and drinking water treatment plant in Sacramento county.

Analysis of Environmental Data

Fundamentals of exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing for environmental scientists, with emphasis on characterizing and evaluating uncertainty. Introduction to selected topics relevant to environmental analysis, including error propagation, design of experiments, and Monte Carlo methods. Explored concepts and techniques presented in lectures with the help of the JmpIn statistics software, using real environmental data.

Elementary fluid mechanics

Course consisted of lectures, one hour of recitation per week, plus individual laboratory experiments. Principles of mechanics as applied to the statics and dynamics of incompressible fluids; open channel flow, fluid measurements, forces on submerged objects, pumps, turbines.

Environmental Engineering

Quantitative overview of the properties of environmental contaminants and the transport and transformation processes that govern their concentrations in air and water. Topics included environmental chemical equilibria and kinetics, reactor models, and elementary transport phenomena. Selected applications to issues in water quality engineering, air quality engineering, and hazardous waste management.

Environmental Microbiology

Basic microbial physiology, biochemistry, metabolism, growth energetics and kinetics, ecology, pathogenicity, and genetics for application to both engineered and natural environmental systems.

Water Chemistry

The application of principles of inorganic, physical, and dilute solution equilibrium chemistry to aquatic systems, both in the aquatic environment and in water and wastewater treatment processes.

Corporate Environmental Management - taken in the Haas School of
Business, University of California, Berkeley

The course investigated some of environmental impacts of business
and strategies for dealing with these impacts that can both
increase profits and benefit the community.  It surveyed the
developments taking place in a wide range of management fields that
have the potential to enable managers to substantially improve the
way firms handle their environmental impacts and respond to the
market opportunities created by regulation and the public's growing
sensitivity to environmental issues.   Course assignments included
the use of a variety of environmental management tools,
organizational strategies and conceptual approaches for improving
the environmental performance of organizations and the business
system as a whole.  The course also gave an introduction to
regulatory and institutional developments taking hold in Europe,
like EMAS, ISO14000, product takeback regulations, and ecolabelling
programs that are forcing American firms to take notice of the new
tools, concepts and strategies for improving environmental
performance. 

Seminars:

Technology and Sustainability

The is investigated important technologies that serve major societal needs. The seminar was framed from the perspective of how technologies do or don't contribute to a move towards sustainability. Elements in the following systems may be considered: buildings, water, food, energy, and transportation. Prepared seminar presentation on sustainable practices in agriculture.

Project work:

As an extension of coursework for "Civil Systems and the Environment" prepared a report investigating the life-cycle effects of tourism on small islands. Report included quantitative assessment of the life-cycle profiles of the hotel and transport industries.

Relevant B.A. Coursework

Student Research

(one year, conducted at the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachussetts Institute of Technology)

Worked on an arsenic speciation project aimed at separating As(III) from As(V) as part of a larger UN effort to solve the problem of naturally occurring arsenic in the ground water in Bangladesh. Developed and optimised a method using ion-exchange resins that enables researchers to separate arsenic species in the field and analyse the samples later in the laboratory. Instrumentation used: GFAAS (graphite-furnace atomic absorption), prepared sediment samples from Bangladesh for XRF (X-ray fluorescence) spectroscopy.

Marine Chemistry

Applications of organic, inorganic, and physical chemistry to describe and quantify processes occurring in seawater. Thermodynamics and kinetics of aqueous solutions, acid-base chemical transformations, role of dissolved carbon dioxide, gas-water exchange, complexation of aqueous metal ions, precipitation and dissolution, oxidation and reduction, electrical aspects of solid-solution interfaces, particle aggregation, trace metal cycling, and photochemistry.

Environmental Geochemistry

An overview of low-temperature geochemistry through the treatment of a selection of geochemical issues of environmental significance. To be expanded

Physical Chemistry

An introduction to modern theories of the structure of matter, including the principles of quantum mechanics, the electronic structure of atoms and molecules, chemical bonding, and atomic and molecular spectra. Projects included empirical calculations of orbital energies using the Schrödinger equations with the help of a software tool (Spartan).

Experimental Synthetic Chemistry

An introduction to experimental problems encountered in the synthesis, isolation, purification, characterization, and identification of inorganic and organic compounds. Worked on a multi-step synthesis of aspartame - developed technical proficiency using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR-250 MHz).

Organic Chemistry

Chemical principles that govern the processes driving living systems are illustrated with examples drawn from biochemistry, cell biology, and medicine. The course deals with organic chemical reactivity (reaction mechanisms, structure-reactivity relationships), with matters specifically relevant to the life sciences (chemistry of proteins, nucleic acids, drugs, natural products, cofactors, signal transduction), and with applications of chemical biology to medicine and biotechnology. Experience and technical proficiency in laboratory techniques, gas, column, thin-layer chromatography, separation, purification techniques.

Molecular Biology

Topics covered: the biochemistry and molecular biology of nucleic acids; the Central Dogma; DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis; mutation and repair; recombination and transposition; the genetic code; the turning on and off of genes; RNA, ribozymes and splicing; development. Laboratory work included performing polymerase chain reactions and identifying and characterising DNA from an unknown organism.

Linear Algebra and Differential Equations

Studied matrices and related topics such as vectors, Euclidean spaces, linear transformations, determinants, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors. Of applications given, considered dynamical systems and both ordinary and partial differential equations.

Additional courses in mathematics, biology, physics, German, French, history, literature and music.