Linne Industries hires senior science advisor

Thomas R. Fisher, Ph.D., joins Linne Industries as the company’s senior science advisor. Fisher will lead the development of testing protocol to deliver measurable water quality improvements in stormwater and golf course ponds.

“As Linne Industries looked to develop research to create measurable results from PondHawk water aeration, Tom was the first person we called,” Sandra Burton, president of Linne Industries and co-inventor of PondHawk, said. 

Fisher has spent the better part of his career at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) researching terrestrial and aquatic systems in the basins of Atlantic estuaries, the Amazon River floodplain and carbonate sands on coral reefs.

“The work Linne Industries is doing to improve water quality in stormwater ponds is an opportunity to apply my expertise in new and exciting ways,” Fisher said. “My primary interest is how land use and human activities on land influence the water quality of streams draining the land.”

Fisher’s professional expertise focuses on atmospheric deposition, historical land use changes, stream chemistry, nutrient procession in streams and estuaries, aquatic nutrient cycling and primary productivity.

“As the UMCES scientists shared nutrient updates with our engineers, the design of PondHawk systems at Linne Industries underwent a steady evolution,” Burton said. “The information we received from Dr. Fisher and the UMCES research gave us insight on pond nutrient loads, new nutrients arriving from the watershed and the PondHawk design changes needed to address the inputs.”

PondHawk said the new baseline water quality assessment will launch during the summer of 2022.