Captain Joseph Hughart

• GEOL 1121: Physical Geology
• GEOL 1122: Historical Geology
• GEOG 1102 World Regional Geography
• GEOG 1111 Physical Geography

Captain Hughart is currently involved in applying his professional experience in earth and environmental sciences to undergraduate geology and geography classes at UNG’s Blue Ridge and Cumming campuses. He enjoys teaching practical skills to mitigate natural hazards in north Georgia. He introduces students to Georgia’s bountiful mineral and non-mineral earth resources, and emphasizes sustainability strategies to protect those resources for future generations. He introduces students to geographic information technology by incorporating remote sensing, digital mapping and geographic information systems into lectures and labs.

Captain Hughart has been a Registered Professional Geologist in the State of Georgia since 1986. 

In the 1980s, he surveyed orphan toxic waste sites across the eastern United States for the Environmental Protection Agency, which led to the first list of environmental cleanup sites under the Superfund program. He served as EPA’s Regional Expert Hydrologist for the southeastern United States from 1984 to 1989.

In the 1990s, he helped establish the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and managed environmental health studies to evaluate relationships between environmental pollution and diseases in communities near U.S. military bases and nuclear weapons production facilities.  

He also traveled widely, and learned about community protection measures implemented by Croatian military forces during the civil wars in the Balkan states, when Serbian forces attacked Croatian chemical plants and petroleum refineries. He taught these community protection measures to law enforcement agencies in the United States, and helped establish U.S. Homeland Security chemical plant protection regulations. He also served as an expert on industrial chemical terrorism to the international symposium of scientists on Medical Treatment of Biological and Chemical Weapons established by the international Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, he served as an international disaster responder with the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, and responded to wars, hazardous materials disasters, and natural disasters worldwide; including the Rwanda Genocide in 1994; the war in Iraq in 2003; the Haiti Earthquake in 2010; the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant disaster in Japan in 2011; and the Syrian civil war in 2012.

He trained and equipped search and rescue teams in the Bahamas and Mexico for the U.S. Department of Defense Northern Command from 2010 until his retirement from federal service in 2018. He equipped and trained 24 hurricane and flood water rescue teams in those countries, and trained Mexico’s first national heavy urban search and rescue team on collapsed structure rescue, hazardous materials emergency response operations, and confined spaces rescue. He is certified in the technical rescue fields of high angle rope rescue, collapsed structure rescue, hazardous materials emergency response operations, surface water rescue, fast rescue boat operations, and swift-water rescue.

Uniformed Service

Captain Hughart served as an enlisted Hospital Corpsman in the U.S. Navy, assigned to the Marine Corps. He was served as a commissioned officer in the Army, and led a Medical Operations Team in a Special Forces battalion. He transferred to the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps in 1989, and served for almost 30 years as an Environmental Health Officer supporting various federal agencies.