Dr. Goovaerts’ academic background, impeccable international reputation as scientist and consultant, multi-disciplinary expertise, and experience in explaining difficult concepts in the classroom are strong assets for testimony in environmental litigations. He has worked with legal teams on several cases, the most recent being the high-profile Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Flint Drinking Water Crisis. In the latter case, Dr. Goovaerts was retained as a geostatistician and geographical information systems (GIS) expert on behalf of a putative subclass of children in the City of Flint who were exposed to, and ingested, Flint Water. Tasks included: 1) estimate the number of potentially-exposed plaintiffs for the city of Flint, 2) construct a database from publically available geospatial data regarding the location and other characteristics (e.g., built year, vacancy) of all the residential and commercial tax parcels in Flint, 3) provide a declaration in support of plaintiffs motion for class certification, and 4) make a deposition.
