Fulbright Experience:
Fulbright to U.S.
About Dr. Loyo:
Jorge Loyo is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department; he also serves as Director of the Energy & Water Sustainability Minor and as Engineering Division Advisor for Chao College. His main interests are sustainability, especially related to the availability of safe drinking water worldwide, and incorporating sustainability into engineering education. He enjoys developing teaching experiences on these topics involving hands-on projects and working with water-related NGOs. Jorge has developed several water- and sustainability-related courses, including CEVE/GLHT 314: Sustainable Water Purification for the Developing World, a project-based course on sustainable strategies for safe water supply in low-income and developing regions. Other courses include CEVE 101: Fundamentals of Civil and Environmental Engineering, CEVE 202: Introduction to Sustainable Engineering, and CEVE 302: Sustainable Design. He also advises undergraduate students in other project-based courses at Rice and works with the Center for Civic Leadership to develop activities that promote student community engagement with international water-related NGOs.
Jorge joined Rice in January 2016 as a lecturer for the NSF-funded Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), and in January 2017, he became NEWT’s Associate Director of Education. In this role, Jorge coordinated and ran NEWT’s REU program, developed and ran NEWT’s Core Course for the center’s first-year graduate students in the four NEWT universities, and collaborated with NEWT’s Innovation Ecosystem Director and the Student Leadership Council in the planning of educational and professional development opportunities for NEWT graduate students and postdocs.
Jorge’s previous research and teaching experience as a postdoctoral scholar (UC Berkeley and Toronto Metropolitan University) and as an assistant professor (Monterrey Tech) span water quality assessment, water and wastewater treatment, emerging organic pollutants, and ecotoxicology. He is a dual citizen of the US and Mexico, holds a B.Sc. in Food Chemistry from the National University of Mexico (UNAM), and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, which I attended as a Fulbright Fellow.
What do you like most about Rice/Houston:
The people, without question.
What do you like most about the Fulbright Program:
The opportunity to expose people to other cultures.
What is a fun fact about you:
I’ve lived in the three NAFTA (aka, USMCA) capital cities.