Current Students
Megan Blumenauer is a PhD student in the Ecosystem Services lab. She received her B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from University of Maryland in 2023 and her M.S. in Civil and Environmental Enginnering from Virginia Tech in 2025. Her research is focused on green infrastructure ecosystem services, with an emphasis on cultural services provisioning (aesthetics, sense of place) and their assessment using virtual reality tools
Megan Blumenauer
Alisha Sutton is a PhD student in the Ecosystem Services lab. She received her M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2023. Her research is focused on PFAS accumulation in animal tissues, the evolving regulatory landscape for PFAS in the United States, and wild food safety
Alisha Sutton
Ali Gagnon is a PhD student at the Hampton Roads Sanitation District. She received her M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on improving process control at Water Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRFs) using traditional control engineering with data-driven and model-based methods.
Ali Gagnon
Former Students
Lauren Krauss
Lauren Krauss was an M.S. and PhD student in the Ecosystem Services lab. She received her M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2020 and her PhD in Civil Engineering in 2025. Her research with Dr. Rippy was focused on green infrastructure ecosystem services, with an emphasis on the capacity of plant functional traits to restore hydrologic services in urban areas.
Ben Roston was an M.S. and PhD student in the Ecosystem Services lab. He received his M.S. 2021 and his PhD in 2025. His research was focused on using fuzzy cognitive maps to understand opportunities for and barriers to collective management of emerging environmental challenges such as freshwater salinization
Ben Roston
Kaitlin Fausey
Samuel Long
Kaitlin Fausey was a Masters student in the Ecosystem Services lab. She graduated in Fall, 2022 with a M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research focused on urban greenspace perceptions. She was particularly interested in understanding which services green stormwater infrastructure are perceived to provide relative to other landscapes, and how an individuals educational background shapes those perceptions.
Samuel Long was a Masters student in the Ecosystem Services lab. He graduated in Spring 2023, with his M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering. His thesis looked at the resilience of stormwater detention basins to freshwater salinization caused by winter salt events. He was particularly interested in the capacity of green infrastructure to self-repair through phytoremediation.
Valeria Lebron was a Masters student in the Ecosystem Services lab. She graduated in Spring 2023, with her M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her project and report focused on characterizing stakeholder planning and implementation networks for green stormwater infrastructure and evaluating the influence of different network structures on ecosystem services provisioning
Valeria Lebron