Shuo Zhao, M.S.
Senior Environmental Engineer
Mr. Zhao is an environmental engineer/full stack developer specializing in enterprise-level geospatial database design and management, geospatial data analysis, and full stack web application development. His recent work includes designing and delivering a fully customized, cloud-based environmental data platform that manages sampling records worldwide across the full data life cycle – from field collection through validation, reporting, and regulatory compliance. Mr. Zhao also has experience in watershed hydrology, chemical fate and transport modeling, and stormwater management. Prior to joining Gradient, he researched the effects of climate change on sediment transport during his graduate work at Tufts University.
Cloud-Based Water Quality Data Management Platform: Designed and delivered a fully customized, cloud-based platform to manage more than two decades of water-quality data across 600+ sampling locations worldwide. Architected an end-to-end solution spanning the full data life cycle: site and sampling program setup, automated chain-of custody generation, multisource electronic data deliverable (EDD) ingestion with real-time validation, sample review and approval workflows, and interactive reporting dashboards. Tailored the system to the client’s business model, internal rules, and regulatory requirements.
Nationwide Environmental Data Collection and Management System: Built a scalable data platform enabling the collection of radon-testing data from environmental professionals through an intuitive web portal. Engineered validation mechanisms that verify submissions in real time, reducing manual review and quality control efforts while safeguarding data integrity. Developed comprehensive monitoring functions that give stakeholders instant visibility into submission progress, surfacing critical summary statistics through a configurable dashboard adaptable to different reporting needs and organizational roles.
Supply Chain and Product Compliance Management Solution: Delivered a scalable platform enabling a manufacturer to manage chemical-reporting compliance across US and Canadian regulations. Collected and processed data from 700+ suppliers and 10,000 products, demonstrating strong scalability while automating supplier surveys, data collection, and analysis. Centralized the workflow to reduce communication overhead and designed the system to accommodate evolving federal and state chemical regulations – ensuring proactive, ongoing compliance.
Database Design: Developed and deployed a custom web database application using Python to serve a large team of toxicologists and chemists to provide hazard and risk evaluations for over 300 ingredients in a consumer product line.
Data Visualization: Developed and maintained a web-based GIS application using ArcGIS Online to help communicate and visualize the results of multiple environmental investigations of a former industrial, urban area slated for mixed-used redevelopment. The web-based mapping tool helped key stakeholders delineate subsurface hydrocarbon and nonaqueous phase liquid (NAPL) impacts, evaluate hypothetical contaminant fate and transport pathways, and characterize potential contaminant sources at a site that was once home to a railyard, manufactured gas plants, tar and roofing plants, a scrap-metal yard, and other industrial operations.
Database Management: Built and managed comprehensive chemical databases for surface water, groundwater, soil, and fish tissue sampling using SQL to support a multi-watershed polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) source investigation in order to identify likely contributors of PCBs to areas where environmental concentrations were elevated.
Database Management: Built and managed SQL databases for soil, soil vapor, and groundwater sampling to support modeling of groundwater flow and contaminant migration from historical releases.
Zhao, S; Rice, J. 2022. “Digitizing the haystack: Using AI-powered text analytics.” Gradient Trends – Risk Science & Application.