The geoscience of reliability engineering: Preparing the process plant for natural disasters

Jennifer Rivers Cole serves on the faculty in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College and the Harvard Graduate School of Sustainability. Prior to that, Dr. Cole served on the faculty at Harvard University in earth and planetary sciences, and was Director of the environmental studies program at Northeastern University for 15 yr. She has also taught at Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Cole has published extensively in the fields of wetlands, agriculture and energy education and has written books on natural disasters. Her career in the environmental consulting field includes serving as an expert witness in wetlands cases and representing town conservation commissions on river and wetlands protection act cases. She was Senior Hydrologist at Weston and Sampson Engineers Inc., and is Principal at her own consulting firm, Rivers Consulting. She has been invited to speak on several occasions, including to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and The Weston Observatory, and has represented Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the White House. She earned a PhD in earth sciences specializing in groundwater geochemistry from Syracuse University.

Drew Troyer is a Principal with T.A. Cook Consultants and has 30 yr of experience serving the manufacturing and process industries. He is a globally recognized expert in the fields of reliability engineering and physical asset management. Mr. Troyer has authored more than 250 books, chapters, articles and technical papers on reliability engineering and asset management, and routinely delivers keynote addresses at global industrial conferences and symposiums. He has also cofounded the Compatible Lands Foundation, a nonprofit land trust dedicated to conserving land and preserving natural resources. Mr. Troyer serves on the ASTM E60.13 standards committee on sustainable manufacturing. He is a Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) and is pursuing an MS degree in sustainability, with an emphasis on sustainable manufacturing, at Harvard University.