To celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial and Guelph’s 190th anniversary, Guelph Museums launched a unique lecture series to reflect on our collective history and the theme of nation building.

Building Canada Lectures, presented in partnership with the University of Guelph, take place on the second Wednesday of each month at 7 p.m. at the Guelph Civic Museum. On May 10, engineering professor Beth Parker presents “From the Ground Water Up: Exploring the Role of Water in Building Canada and the Impact on our Future.”

Parker arrived at the University of Guelph in 2007 as a professor in the School of Engineering with an NSERC Senior Industrial Research Chair on Fractured Rock Contaminant Hydrology. She is the founding director of the G360 Centre for Applied Groundwater Research with more than 45 research staff and graduate students. Parker has more than 30 years of experience as a groundwater professional, performing subsurface investigations regarding contaminant behaviour in different hydrogeologic systems, especially the role of diffusion on contaminant mobility, attenuation and remediation performance.

Her current research activities emphasize novel field and laboratory measurements that improve characterization of aquitards and groundwater flow systems pertaining to source water protection and risk mitigation strategies. Her novel approach and scientific contributions to subsurface field investigations and monitoring are recognized internationally, resulting in invitations to work collaboratively with industrial site owners, municipalities, consultants and researchers on numerous complex sites across Canada, the U.S., Europe, Brazil and recently China.