Derrick Rodriguez

Derrick Rodriguez is a Teaching Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines. He has held previous roles as an adjunct faculty member in Mechanical Engineering, research faculty in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and consulted for the Department of Energy’s Environmental Restoration Program. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Engineering (2006) from Mines, an M.S. in Environmental Engineering, and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Wyoming. Rodriguez is a registered professional environmental engineer in Idaho.

His research interests span environmental engineering, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics, with a focus on contaminant transport processes in heterogeneous media and reactive transport modeling. He has contributed to studies on uranium migration, DNAPL distribution effects, and upscaling sorption processes in environmental systems.

Rodriguez teaches core mechanical engineering courses including Fluid Mechanics, Thermodynamics, and Computational Fluid Dynamics. He has no listed scientific awards but has extensive industry collaboration experience. Personal interests include motorcycling, martial arts (1st degree brown belt in Hawaiian Kenpo), and family life in Applewood, Colorado.