Jeffrey King, PhD, PE, CFM

For over a decade, Jeffrey worked as a public servant, as a research hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in their Caribbean and Florida Water Science Center and as an in-house consultant to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Flood Insurance Program in greater Washington, DC. With the USGS, Jeffrey simulated flow and effluent transport in the Floridan aquifer system in Miami, investigating a subsurface Karst-collapse structure that may have allowed municipal wastewater injected near the base of the Floridan to migrate vertically into an underground source of drinking water. Jeffrey characterized hydrogeologic parameters in the Floridan with hydraulic tomography using the federal supercomputer Yeti. He also helped the Florida Department of Environmental Protection make a regulatory decision with a possible $500M infrastructure consequence. His work influenced Miami-Dade County’s decision to drill a 2-mile-deep well on Virginia Key, to attempt to identify an alternate permeable zone beneath the Floridan to dispose of effluent. In this work, Jeffrey routinely and efficiently communicated complex technical information to expert and lay audiences.

Jeffrey has also served as an expert in federal and state courts in the United States. This work included advising a federal special master in a major 20-year-long lawsuit involving remediating mercury discharged from a chlor-alkali facility in Maine. The discharge contaminated sediments along 30 kilometers of river and estuary from the 1960s to the 1990s creating a complex Superfund site. In this work, Jeffrey simulated estuarine hydrodynamics and bed shear stress in the macro-tidal Penobscot River and Penobscot Estuary to evaluate $200M in remedial options that will reduce mercury concentrations and mitigate harm to people, other living organisms, and the environment.

Jeffrey’s work has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Hydrology Journal, Water Resources Research, and Continental Shelf Research. He has also authored USGS reports and information products and contributed to Elsevier’s 12-volume Treatise on Estuarine and Coastal Science.