Dr. Richard PeraltaDr Peralta, Professional Engineer, has 20+ years of experience in building optimization models for groundwater management. He and his teams have created many models for regional groundwater planning, for conjunctive water management, and for groundwater contamination plume management. These have included large stream-aquifer systems having thousands of decision and state variables in the optimization problem. They have also designed vadose zone optimization models having over a thousand variables. He has used their optimization models to develop optimal pump and treat strategies for over ten sites, saving clients millions of dollars--all constructed designs have been successful and strategies provided for existing systems have improved their management. He has: co-authored over 45 peer-reviewed journal articles and almost 200 other reports and publications; helped negotiate agreements with environmental regulators that avoided legal disputes; persuaded regulators and managers to employ optimization for addressing conflicts; taught groundwater optimization on several continents, in English or Spanish; served as consultant on most arable continents; evaluated many groundwater models, pump and treat or remediation systems, and environmental programs, saving clients much money; and received several awards. To make using optimization easy and practical, he has led the development of the comprehensive SOMOS software. SOMOS includes significant capabilities needed for the dozens of completed real-world optimization projects.