Dr. Jane Frankenberger leads an active applied research and Extension program on agricultural drainage, watershed management, and water quality.
Extension Program: Her goal is to build the capacity of agencies, producers, watershed coordinators, communities, and citizens to protect water quality while maintaining agricultural productivity. She is responsible for the Purdue Extension program in soil and water engineering and agricultural water management. She is an author or co-author of more than 40 extension publications dealing with watershed management and assessment, wellhead protection, drinking water testing and treatment, and land use impacts on water quality. She has led numerous projects working with communities and public water supply systems throughout Indiana to develop source water protection strategies and manage drinking water quality.
Research Program: Dr. Frankenberger’s research has advanced drainage design and management, watershed modeling of agricultural systems, and soil and water conservation strategies, while delivering tools and strategies to stakeholders who can use them to inform decision making. She developed a GIS-based model of the variable source area runoff-generating process responsible for transport of pollutants such as pathogens and pesticides transported primarily by surface runoff, and has analyzed factors that can be used to determine critical watersheds for pesticide contamination in Indiana. She has studied the impact of spatial variability of precipitation and topography in site-specific agriculture, and is using the drainage model DRAINMOD to predict water and nitrate pathways and flow quantities in areas of subsurface drainage. She led the $5 million Transforming Drainage project that advances water storage in the landscape to increase resilience of drained agricultural land.
Before joining the Purdue faculty, she led small-scale irrigation projects with women’s cooperatives in northern Senegal for five years. Her international experience also includes 2½ years as a teacher in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She earned a B.A. in Physics and Religion from St. Olaf College, an M.S. in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Biological Engineering from Cornell University.
