Above: Water is routed into a treatment facility.
Water resources lie at the center of this century’s most urgent environmental challenges. At the same time, energy production and supply will continue to drive anthropogenic climate change, exacerbating the risks of water shortages, floods, vector-borne diseases and disrupted food production. To ensure reliable and safe water resources for a rapidly growing global population, research must address basic and emerging questions and find novel solutions.
Faculty in this department work on the grand challenges of our changing climate. How do energy supply and green-house gas emissions alter atmospheric dynamics? What are the spatial and temporal patterns of the water cycle, particularly at the extremes of flood and drought? We aim to explain how these processes work and interact, and in so doing develop prognostic capabilities in the service of a global human population. Our work is steeped in classical concepts and in step with breakthrough research.
Faculty
Bioelectronics, synthetic biology, microbiology, electrochemistry, cell-material interfaces, biophysics, environmental sensing
Environmental Fluid Mechanics & Turbulence, Boundary-Layer Meteorology, Urban Climatology & Hydrology, Wind Energy
Water at Interfaces, Clay Minerals, Nanogeochemistry, Groundwater Hydrology
Groundwater Hydrology, Geological Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide, Modeling Multiphase Flow in Porous Media
Complex Infrastructure Systems, Network Analysis, Graph Learning, Risk & Resilience Analysis, Computational Modeling, Digital Twin
Feammox; Fate/Transport of Pollutants; Biotransformation of Organics/Metals; PFAS Defluorination; Waste Treatment.
Membranes, Electrochemistry, Ion Selective Materials, Environmental Technologies, Waste Treatment, Resource Recovery
Dr. Li’s research focuses on the mechanics and physics of…
Hurricane Hazards, Risk Analysis, Coastal Resilience, Climate Change Adaptation
Optical metamaterials; heat mitigation and sensing, radiative transfer across nanoscales, built environments, and the atmosphere
Energy/air quality/water/climate nexus; Impacts of energy choices; Atmospheric chemistry modeling
Hydrology, Understanding perturbations to the hydrologic cycle through observations and numerical models, Reactive transport, Scaling in watersheds, Coupled simulation and high-performance computing
Architected Materials; Advanced and Additive manufacturing; Bio-inspired Design; Automated Robotic Fabrication
Environmental Geochemistry, Subsurface Engineering, Geologic Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide, Water Quality, X-Ray Spectroscopic Imaging
Ecohydrology, Environmental Fluid Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Statistical Physics
Sustainable infrastructure, cities, Food-Energy-Water Nexus, environmental modeling, science-policy linkages, India
Water-Energy Nexus; Environmental Technologies; Waste Treatment; Resource Recovery; Microbial Electrochemistry
Research Interests
Professor Villarini's research interests focus broadly on flood hydrology, extreme events, hydroclimatology, and climate predictions and projections. He has received a number of national and international awards, including the Hydrological Sciences Outstanding Young Scientist Award by…
Sustainable Cements; CO2 Capture and Utilization; Disordered Materials: Multiscale Modeling and Characterization
Atmospheric Chemistry and Composition Group