President’s Message

Greg Gdowski, PhD University of Rochester RES President June 1, 2020 - May 31, 2022

Dear Fellow Engineers,

We are finally back to mask-less days ahead of us! It is hard for me to believe that my term of office began virtually during the pandemic. I have yet to have had an in-person meeting as President of the RES. I wish I could say that the first year of my term was more successful. We had to manage the finances of the organization while all of our in-person events and those that we helped to manage for other organizations were cancelled. We applied for PPP loans, and minimized our expenses to help weather the financial losses. Your support as members was never so important as it was this last year. In one of the toughest times in the history of the RES, we have managed to recruit nearly a dozen new corporate members! We created a RES virtual Engineering Symposium which yielded 320 registrations! We modified the delivery of the magazine and have sought to bring you remarkable news from our engineering community that resulted in large increases in readership. We could not have done it without the remarkable help of all of our volunteers and leaders. It has not been easy, but we will survive. I am incredibly thankful to the community for your support and faith in the organization. It is because of you that we still exist today!

In the upcoming year, I hope to host new additional events that bring us together. We received some great feedback during the virtual Annual meeting, and I hope that we can deliver on some of the ideas that were conveyed by the membership. We will also begin the planning of the Gala for this coming April, which will mark the 125th anniversary of the RES! The Magazine Committee has been working to revise the look of the magazine! We hope to highlight some of the new Corporate members in the feature articles in the upcoming year. Please don’t forget that there are still three virtual Symposium sessions left in June (8-10) that will provide up to an additional 9 PDHs! Registration for these sessions are still open! You really don’t want to miss the sessions on Public Projects of Interest (June 8th), Facility Infrastructure (June 9th), and Codes and Requirements (June 10th). Each of these sessions will have great presentations including topics such as the Peace Bridge Rehabilitation project, the Rochester Skate Park, Complete Street Makeovers, and Acoustic Noise Abatement. If you are in need of PDH credit to maintain your PE, this is a great opportunity to get it done for only $10/PDH!

You may recall that the water you drink is brought to you courtesy of many RES engineers that helped to build the Hemlock and Candice pipelines in the early 1900s. It seems fitting that a collaboration here in Rochester is leading the charge in assessing the quality of our water. Plastics are big part of every product around us; from the computers we use daily to the bags we use to store our food. Are these products poisoning our water supply? Take a look at the lead article in this issue. You might think twice about the water you drink at home! One of my fun hobbies has been salt-water reef aquariums where the key to being successful revolves around your ability to control the quality of your water column. I can only imagine the consequences of microplastics in our oceans and the long-term impact it will have on reefs world-wide. I am extremely proud of some of the novel work that is being done in this space here in Rochester. Make sure to check out this article!

I hope you have a great summer!

All my best, Greg Gdowski, PhD President, RES

Greg Gdowski, PhD University of Rochester RES President June 1, 2020 - May 31, 2022