Richard M. Gersberg is head of the division of environmental health at SDSU's Graduate School of Public Health. He is also director of the Coastal and Marine Institute at SDSU and principal investigator of SDSU's California Distance Learning Health Network, an organization that uses the latest in technology to provide continuing education to professional health workers. Gersberg specializes in water quality research and limnology, and has broad experience working with both chemical and microbiological pollutants and risk assessments. He has over 50 scientific publications in these areas. Gersberg has conducted a number of studies on the fate of bacterial indicators and toxics in both freshwater and estuarine ecosystems. He has recently completed a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-funded project on monitoring and modeling of stormwater contamination in the Tijuana River watershed. He is also a co-principal investigator of a project funded by the Regional Water Quality Control Board to characterize pollutant loading from point and non-point sources into Tecate Creek in Mexico. Gersberg holds an M.S. in biology from the University of Houston and a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of California, Davis.