Michael Piasecki

The principal, Michael Piasecki, PhD., received his Diploma in civil engineering from the University of Hannover, Germany in 1991, and his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1994. Since then he has been working as a faculty member for water resources in the civil engineering departments of the American University of Beirut (1996 - 1998), Drexel University (Philadelphia, 1998 - 2010), and The City College of New York (2011 - present).

In this capacity he has been teaching courses on Hydrology and Hydraulics covering topics such as Fluid Mechanics, Open Channel Flow, Surface Flow Hydrology, Computational Hydraulics, and also GIS in Water Resources. His research interests address informatics solutions in the area of Hydrology, information systems for hydrologic sciences, data management for hydrologic data, hydrologic processes in watersheds, in addition to ecologically sustainable development and protection of catchment water resources.

He currently is a member of American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the International Association of Environment and Hydraulic Research (IAHR). He is serving on the AGU council, is the Chair for the Earth Space Science Informatics (ESSI) Focus Group, in addition to being the Vice Chair of the IAHR Joint Hydroinformatics Committee. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief for the Earth-Perspectives: Transdisciplinarity EnabledJournal (Springer) and as Associate Editor for the Earth Science Informatics (Springer) journal.

He has conducted project work for company alliances on discharge regulations, law firms to conduct forensic assessment of stormwater/flood damages, engineering firms to address pump failures in deep wells, design of waste water treatment effluent discharge systems, and water quality assessments in streams via use of numerical models. He is also involved in the Engineers without Borders initiative as mentor of the CCNY student chapter aiding them in ecologically sustainable solutions on projects such as water supply and sanitation and also the use of alternative building material. He also collaborates with colleagues in the Architecture program to design ecology sound solutions for integrated infrastructure development such as Eco-Villages.

Paul Celicourt

Paul Celicourt, M.Sc., is a senior project engineer who received his bachelor of Electro-Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Haiti in 2008, a Master of Science in Urban Sustainability at City College New York in 2011, and a PhD in Civil Engineering from the The City College of New York in 2017. 

His PhD work involved the development ultra-cheap hydro-climate sensor stations (called TransducerX) that are easily deployed. The stations are equipped with advanced software components that ensure link and self-organization into networks with automated communications using ZigBee protocols (intra sensor network) and dialing into cellular networks for data transmissions (extra sensor network).

The TransducerX system provides a complete sensor-to-end user package in which data management aspects in addition to data submission and retrieval are handled automatically thus providing a solution that is as hands-off as it can be. He partners with PIWAREC through his own company SENSAQ and provides experience in sensor deployment, programming, and also watershed hydrology for work carried in out in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.