Dr. Karatüm joined the U.A. Whitaker College of Engineering in the Fall 2019. Dr. Karatüm is an environmental engineer by training and specializes in water quality, novel oil spill response technologies, and analytical characterization of wastewater from oil and gas operations. He earned his undergraduate degree in Food Engineering from Ege University in Izmir, Turkey. He worked on characterization of aroma and flavor compounds. For his Master’s degree at Duke University, he worked on non-thermal plasma for treatment of low concentration volatile organic compounds (VOCs). During his doctoral work at Duke University and Yale University, he worked on the development of novel materials such as aerogels for oil spill remediation and recovery. Additionally, he has been involved in the development of interchangeable (nonpolar to polar) surfaces (i.e., “smart materials”) in the context of water treatment technologies, and he has conducted life cycle assessment (LCA) to asses economic and environmental feasibility of these novel materials. After graduate school, Dr. Karatüm worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Virginia Tech, where he conducted research to characterize respiratory droplets and aerosols. Before joining FGCU, Dr. Karatüm worked for a scientific consulting company, Exponent, in Los Angeles. At Exponent, his work focused on environmental litigation cases. His research interests include water quality, aerogels, oil chemistry, oil spill response, and flowback and produced water characterization from hydraulic fracturing operations.