Keri C. Hornbuckle, professor of civil and environmental engineering and associate dean for academic programs, and Michelle M. Scherer, professor and departmental executive officer of civil and environmental engineering, will be appointed by the College of Engineering to Donald E. Bently Professors of Engineering, effective July 1, 2015.

Hornbuckle is an internationally recognized expert in the fate and transport of pollutants in the environment whose research publications have been sited more than 3,200 times. She has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the environmental sources, transport, fate, and impact of semivolatile organic pollutants, such as polychlorinated diphenyls (PCBs), and emerging chemical pollutants such as perfluorinated compounds, synthetic musks, and siloxanes.  She was selected to serve as the associate editor of Environmental Science and Technology, and was appointed to the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Joint Commission.  Hornbuckle has served as departmental executive officer of civil and environmental engineering, as well as president, chair, and vice president of several international and national scientific and professional societies and associations. She also is a UI professor of occupational and environmental health, faculty research engineer at IIHR--Hydroscience & Engineering, and researcher at the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research.

Scherer is widely known for her ground-breaking work on redox reactions which occur at mineral-water interfaces, and her work has fundamentally changed scientists' understanding of this important aspect of environmental chemistry.  Her research has resulted in numerous publications in high impact journals, such as Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T), JGR-Atmospheres, and PNAS, and has more than 4,800 total citations. The impact of her research has been recognized by several awards including the UI Faculty Scholar Award (2005-2008), the UI College of Engineering Award for Exceptional Research (2007) and the prestigious 2010 Malcolm Pirnie/AEESP Frontier in Research Award.  Michelle's research program has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and USDA. She is a researcher at the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, the Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Institute, and research engineer at IIHR-Hydroscience & Engineering.

The Donald E. Bently Professorship in Engineering was established in June 2002 through a gift to the University of Iowa Foundation from University of Iowa engineering graduate Donald E. Bently of Minden, NV.  A globally recognized authority on rotor dynamics as well as vibration monitoring and diagnostics, Mr. Bently graduated from the UI in 1949 with a B.S. degree with distinction, and in 1950 with an M.S. degree, both in electrical engineering, from the UI College of Engineering. Working from his garage as a graduate student, Mr. Bently pioneered and perfected a transistorized design for a new type of distance-measuring device. His transducer soon found its application inside machinery where it was used to observe the vibration and position characteristics that are important indicators of machinery condition.