From Turkey to the space shuttle: Berrin Tansel is a leader in coastal hazards and water conservation

By Adrienne Sylver

In a tiny town in Turkey, a young Berrin Tansel spent much of her time swimming with her five brothers and sisters in the clear coastal waters. But when they began coming home with black, sticky tar on their feet ― a sign of the arrival of the petroleum industry ― Tansel knew her agricultural and fishing village was in for a change.

What she couldn’t know at the time was how much her own life would be impacted by this environmental event.

Today, Berrin Tansel, Ph.D., is a professor of environmental engineering and undergraduate program director of FIU's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. An expert in coastal water management and pollution, coastal hazards and water conservation, Tansel has received numerous honors including the prestigious 2021 Science Award from the American Academy of Environmental Engineers & Scientists. She was also named the 2021 Margaret S. Petersen Outstanding Woman of the Year by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Among her other notable accomplishments, Tansel helped NASA build water filtration systems for use in space vehicles and was part of the Boston Harbor project that transformed what was then known as the dirtiest harbor in America. She was also part of the team that lead research on the effects of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

From Turkey to Miami

The path from Turkey to Boston to Miami wasn’t premeditated or without hardship. But for the kid whose parents didn’t even attend high school, it has been an adventure brought about through an incessant drive for knowledge, consistent hard work, deep self-discovery and plenty of opportunity.

“I’ve always had the attitude that trying is better than doing nothing,” Tansel says. “If someone asked me for one solution, I gave them three.”

Tansel majored in chemical engineering at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. In addition to her love and respect for the water, it was the hiring of engineers by the petrochemical companies that had arrived in her hometown that built her awareness and interest in engineering.

She received a Fulbright Scholarship to continue her education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she earned her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in civil and environmental engineering.

Arriving in Wisconsin in 1978, her prior knowledge of the United States came from pictures of New York City and the TV show Dallas. Tansel was in for a bit of a culture shock. “When I got off the plane in Madison, I remember the smell of agriculture. This was not what I’d seen on TV,” she says. “But it reminded me of home.”

As she furthered her education, she met her future husband ― another student from Turkey, Ibrahim Tansel, Ph.D., now a mechanical engineering professor at FIU and a professor of the STEM Transformation Institute. When he accepted a faculty position at Tufts University, the couple moved to Boston.

“Here I was, a postdoc, married and with a small child. I moved without a job,” she recalls. “I had no idea what I was going to do. I was willing to answer phones and make coffee if I had to.” She entered the industry, working as a senior project engineer for a Cambridge consulting firm, and then took the position of project manager with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.

In 1990, after some five years in a city and job she loved, Tansel had another decision to make when her husband announced he wanted to accept an offer from Florida International University. “I said that I would not move without a job this time,” Tansel says. Fortunately, FIU offered her a visiting professorship, which she quickly parlayed into a permanent position.

Kenndy Space Center comes calling

Tansel credits her husband with believing in her skills and continuously urging her to seek new experiences and further her work in the research arena. Kennedy Space Center and NASA offered professors the opportunity to come to the center as faculty research fellows. When he applied, he pushed her to fill out an application as well.

“Both of us were turned down several times, but then one summer I got the call. They were interested in the water filtration system I had developed with the Army for the Gulf War and wanted to see if it could be applied to the Space Shuttle to improve its water recycling and conservation,” she says. They also offered her husband a fellowship and had an internship for their older daughter, a college student who was majoring in biomedical engineering.

“Being at Kennedy Space Center was a little like being in the Twilight Zone,” she says. “Everything was about the return to space and the International Space Station. It was very collaborative and exciting — and I learned so much.” Her work over two summers in 2004 and 2005 led to space shuttle improvements and the publication of numerous research papers.

An oil disaster

Over the years, Tansel’s work had focused more on water filtration and conservation, and she wondered if the time she’d devoted to oil spill management was obsolete. “Then the big oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico,” she says.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion off the Louisiana coast resulted in 4 million barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. As an expert in marine oil pollution, Tansel was tapped by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine as a consortium member for the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. Among their groundbreaking work was the National Academies Press publication, “Oil in the Sea, IV: Inputs, Faces, and Effects.”

Tansel has also pushed her environmental work forward through research that has been supported by National Science Foundation grants. Those awards and an agreement with Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department to improve old, leaky pipes and study the water treatment system, also give FIU students research opportunities, internships and jobs upon graduation.

 Mentoring

As an accomplished female in an industry still dominated by men, Tansel sees her role as a mentor as significant. “My mother always said that education is the golden bracelet. It loses something in the translation, but she felt as if she had missed something important without education.” Tansel’s mother didn’t live long enough to see the accomplishments of her four daughters, who earned college degrees with three of them becoming Ph.D.s, and her two sons, who had successful careers as a diplomate and a ship captain, respectively.

Her own daughters understood the message about education, too, both becoming engineers. One is now a physician in Pittsburgh and the other is a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University.

Tansel likes to remind her students that they are being judged by what they do, what they say and how they present themselves. She didn’t lack ambition as a young professional, but she was shy and would defer, as the times required, to her more mature and largely male colleagues.

“I do a lot of hiring, and I’ve noticed that the men I offer jobs to always ask for more money. The women never do. Instead, they ask when they can start. As I prepare my students for interviews, I tell them to be professional, never be late, always be ready with extra resumes, and always, always negotiate.”

And when they start their first jobs, she leaves them with a little more advice. “Your job doesn’t come with a user’s manual. Show up and do what you say you are going to do.”

While some her age are contemplating retirement, Tansel says she welcomes more opportunities. “In your lifetime you will have papers rejected, you won’t be hired for a job you want, you will face the unexpected. But you will have opportunities and when they come, you can’t be afraid to take them."