Public Biography
Dr. Alan Pressler is a hydraulic systems engineer and the associate director of the National Institute of Residential Water Pressure Standards in College Park, Maryland, where he has worked since 2014. His research focuses on water pressure tolerances in consumer fixtures, with particular attention to the biomechanical limits of the human body under directed water flow.
Dr. Pressler received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland in 2011, where his doctoral dissertation, “Threshold Pressures for Soft Tissue Disruption Under Laminar and Turbulent Flow Conditions,” was described by his committee as “rigorous and disturbingly specific.” He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Penn State.
Before joining the Institute, he spent three years at the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, where he studied the effects of high-pressure water on various materials, an experience he has described as “relevant to my current work in ways I did not anticipate when I entered the consumer plumbing field.”
Dr. Pressler has authored or co-authored more than forty peer-reviewed papers on residential water pressure safety and is the lead author of the Institute’s widely referenced publication, Recommended Pressure Limits for Consumer Hygiene Fixtures (2019), which established the benchmarks now used by most major plumbing manufacturers. He has testified before the Consumer Product Safety Commission on four occasions, most recently in 2025 regarding pressure amplification systems in imported bidet seats.
He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and has described his work as “the sort of thing no one thinks about until it becomes the only thing they can think about.”