Report on past WALPA Scholarship winner Rebecca Dugopolski
Rebecca Dugopolski
Rebecca Dugopolski received a scholarship from WALPA in 2004 to help fund her Master’s research. Her research project involved nine months of weekly sampling to evaluate the effects of an aluminum sulfate treatment on Seattle’s Green Lake. Rebecca also spent six months at Uppsala University in Sweden on a Valle Fellowship. She graduated with a Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Washington in December 2005. In January 2006, she began working for Herrera Environmental Consultants in Seattle and continues to do so, specializing in stormwater, water quality, and limnology projects.
Rebecca served as WALPA’s treasurer from 2008 to 2010 and became a licensed professional civil engineer in 2009. During the past year, she has worked on a variety of different projects: developing retrofit designs for existing stormwater ponds to improve water quality treatment, rewriting the statewide protocol for testing new stormwater technologies (TAPE), and helping the Washington State Department of Transportation get approval for a new stormwater treatment technology (compost-amended biofiltration swale). She has also given stormwater trainings in several parts of the state on illicit discharge detection and elimination, operation and maintenance, and low impact development.
When not working, Rebecca volunteers at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library where she hosts a weekly show called “Animals and the Environment.” She also competes in the DiscNW Ultimate Frisbee league with her team, ALLCAPS. Each year, Rebecca organizes a group of coworkers and friends to do a community service project on Seattle Works Day. She lives in Seattle with her husband James, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington.
