Civil and Environmental Engineering

Bridges: new structural (mobile) typologies; pre-stressed tension structures: splines and membranes; shells: textile reinforced shells, adaptable formwork, shape optimization; historic structures: restoration and upgrading methodologies; durability: life-cycle design of new infrastructure; efficiency: form-finding techniques, structural optimization.

Design and rehabilitation of bridges; thin shell concrete structures; tall buildings; concrete dams; history and aesthetics of structures; transformation of American society by engineers.

Environmental fluid mechanics and turbulence; Boundary layer meteorology; Hydrometeorology and surface-atmosphere interactions; Multiscale large-eddy simulations and subgrid-scale modeling; Distributed wireless sensing network.

Land degradation and surface water balance partitioning; Geophysical methods for soil moisture and vegetation characterization; Optimal vegetation organization in drylands; Catchment ecohydrology of drylands; Couplings between biogeochemistry, plants, and water.

Modeling flow in porous media; Geological storage as a carbon mitigation option, Ecohydrology; Ground-water hydrology; Subsurface contaminant transport; Multiphase flow physics.

Structural engineering; Fire-structure interaction; Earthquake engineering; Thin shell concrete roof structures; Structural art.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM); Infrastructure-bridges, dams and dikes, lifelines; Oil and gas industry; Structures, structural art and heritage structures; Hazard mitigation and enhancement of safety; Sustainability.

Transport and transformation of pollutants in the environment; Remediation of contaminated systems; Numerical simulation of denitrification in soils as a function of rainfall and soil properties; Climate change models; Biogeochemically mediated dynamics of trace metals in sediments, Wetland soils, and groundwater; Biological reduction of uranium in groundwater; Long-term stability of the reduced uranium phases; Nitrogen processing in urban settings coupled to urban hydrology.

Natural Hazards and Risk Assessment, Stochastic Modeling, Wind Engineering, Coastal Engineering, Climate Change Impact and Adaptation, Built Environment and Sustainability.

The objective of my research group is to utilize science to inform the development of far-sighted air quality policy that considers impacts of air pollution on human health, agriculture and climate change. Recent research projects have assessed the climatic benefit of black carbon (soot) mitigation, evaluated the global crop yield reductions due to present and potential future ozone exposure, evaluated inter-continental transport of fine aerosols, and estimated the impact of present and potential future emissions of aerosols from China on global air quality, premature mortality and radiative forcing.

Environmental chemistry, geochemistry, and reactive transport; with focused application on organic chemical pollutants and sequestration of carbon dioxide. Unique to my research program is the integration of well-designed experimental measurement of phase thermodynamics and reaction kinetics with theoretical modeling for interpretation and prediction. In recent years, I have also devoted a portion of my scholarly work to research in sustainable energy, with focus on energy use in residential buildings and disaster-recovery technologies for rapid response.

Dynamics; nonlinear mechanics; Mixture theories; Finite element methods; XFEM; Constitutive coupled models for CO2 storage in geological deposits.

Ecohydrology; Hydrogeomorphology and surface hydrology; Modelling of interacting hydrologic, ecologic, and geomorphological dynamics; Hydrologic controls of biodiversity in river basins and savannas; Soil moisture dynamics in space and time; Hydrologic and ecologic dynamics of wetlands.

Durability of infrastructure; Damage to materials by frost and salt; Conservation of art and architecture; Transport in porous materials; Nucleation and growth kinetics; Relaxation processes; Sol-gel processing.

Hydrology, hydraulics and hydrometeorology of extreme floods; environmental remote sensing; development of technologies for measuring precipitation processes from weather radar and lidar; stochastic modeling of hydrometeorological processes; atmospheric and land surface processes in urban environments.

Stochastic systems; random fields and random media; risk assessment and management; earthquake and wind engineering; geologic hazards and probabilistic site characterization; structural reliability; random vibrations; optimum design based on reliability; modeling the density fluctuations in the early universe, relevant to origins of cosmic structure.

Hydroclimatology with an emphasis on land atmospheric interactions; terrestrial remote sensing; seasonal hydrologic climate forecasts, including land-climate teleconnections; terrestrial water and energy balances and fluxes over a range of spatial and temporal scales; remote-sensing research focuses on estimating the hydrologic and energetic states of the terrestrial system; validating satellite retrievals on land surface states.

Atmospheric chemistry; field experiments investigating urban air quality and global climate change; global distribution of trends of atmospheric water vapor; cloud and aerosol microphysics and chemistry; laser-based instrument development and deployment for atmospheric studies.

Ceramics and glasses; colloidal dispersions; nanoscience and nanotechnology.

Automatic controls; tunable laser design; bio-mimic robotics; the terrestrial planet finder; design and control of a high contrast coronagraph.

Oceanic cycles of climatically important chemicals such as carbon dioxide; study of ocean circulation using chemical tracers; and climate and ecosystem modeling. Keywords: carbon mitigation, climate science and modeling, oceanography, ocean biogeochemisty, the global carbon cycle, and climate.