Chris Lehman & Shelley Blackwell

About Chris Lehman & Shelley Blackwell

After serving six years in the Navy as a radar electrician, Chris began his wastewater career with the City of San Luis Obispo in 2010 as an Operator in Training. Since then, Chris has served as a State licensed Grade Five Operator, Plant Superintendent and is currently working as the Deputy Director of the City''s Wastewater Division, which oversees five programs: Environmental Programs/Stormwater, Wastewater Collections, Water Resource Recovery Facility, Water Quality Lab and Solid Waste and Recycling. In 2014 he served as the Operations lead for the Sustainable Solutions Turnkey (SST) project, a partnership with PG&E that was the first of its kind in the State. Chris has worked with California Polytechnic State University to develop and expand the Sustainable Utilities Research and Education (SURE!) program, which is a partnership between the University and the City that fosters career development, cutting-edge treatment technologies, and crowdsources data collection and analysis.

Shelley has 20 years of experience managing research projects at the interface of engineering and aquatic biology at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). During the last ten years, she has managed the technical and operational aspects of multiple millions of dollars in wastewater resource recovery projects involving pilot- and full-scale facilities. Together with Dr. Tryg Lundquist, in partnership with the City of San Luis Obispo, they have developed the Sustainable Utilities Research and Education program (SURE!) at Cal Poly, engaging undergraduate and graduate students to advance nature-based wastewater treatment and resource recovery technologies. Prior to her work on wastewater resource recovery, she managed research projects using autonomous underwater vehicles to study coastal ocean phytoplankton communities.