Yue Rong ’86 to receive 2019 Earth Caretaker Award

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Environmental Management and Business Institute (EMBI) will award the 10th annual Earth Caretaker Award to UW-Green Bay alumnus Yue Rong, ’86 (Master of Environmental Science). The annual event and awards presentation is Earth Day, April 22, 2019, in Phoenix AB.

Yue Rong

Rong (aka, YR), a Ph.D., is the environmental program manager at the California Environmental Protection Agency, Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. He has also served as the acting assistant executive officer of the Regional Water Quality Control Board, in the groundwater division. Rong is in charge of site assessment and remediation of leaking underground storage tank (UST) sites, and the program of water quality control in oil and gas production fields.

The UST program contains a large number of leaking UST sites to be remediated in Los Angeles area, which was ranked in top 10 in terms of total numbers of the impacted sites. He has 29 years of experience with the Agency in dealing with groundwater contamination problems in the Los Angeles area. His expertise includes organic pollutants fate and transport in the subsurface soil and groundwater, environmental analytical chemistry and quality assurance and quality control, environmental statistics, risk assessment, and soil and groundwater pollution assessment and remediation. The projects he is involved with include collaboration with USEPA at Superfund sites in Los Angeles area, Santa Monica methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) drinking water pollution cleanup, I-710 corridor regional cleanup, and water quality control at oil and gas production fields in Los Angeles area.