Water, Climate and Energy

Water management infrastructure

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

Joshua Atkinson

Bioelectronics, synthetic biology, microbiology, electrochemistry, cell-material interfaces, biophysics, environmental sensing 
 

Elie Bou-Zeid

Environmental Fluid Mechanics & Turbulence, Boundary-Layer Meteorology, Urban Climatology & Hydrology, Wind Energy

Ian Bourg

Water at Interfaces, Clay Minerals, Nanogeochemistry, Groundwater Hydrology

Michael Celia

Groundwater Hydrology, Geological Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide, Modeling Multiphase Flow in Porous Media

Jürgen Hackl

Complex Infrastructure Systems, Network Analysis, Graph Learning, Risk & Resilience Analysis, Computational Modeling, Digital Twin

Peter Jaffé

Feammox; Fate/Transport of Pollutants; Biotransformation of Organics/Metals; PFAS Defluorination; Waste Treatment.

Ryan Kingsbury

Membranes, Electrochemistry, Ion Selective Materials, Environmental Technologies, Waste Treatment, Resource Recovery

Ning Lin

Hurricane Hazards, Risk Analysis, Coastal Resilience, Climate Change Adaptation

Jyotirmoy Mandal

Optical metamaterials; heat mitigation and sensing, radiative transfer across nanoscales, built environments, and the atmosphere

Denise Mauzerall

Energy/air quality/water/climate nexus; Impacts of energy choices; Atmospheric chemistry modeling

Reed Maxwell

Hydrology, Understanding perturbations to the hydrologic cycle through observations and numerical models, Reactive transport, Scaling in watersheds, Coupled simulation and high-performance computing

Reza Moini

Architected Materials; Advanced and Additive manufacturing; Bio-inspired Design; Automated Robotic Fabrication

Catherine Peters

Environmental Geochemistry, Subsurface Engineering, Geologic Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide, Water Quality, X-Ray Spectroscopic Imaging

Amilcare Porporato

Ecohydrology, Environmental Fluid Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Statistical Physics

Anu Ramaswami

Sustainable infrastructure, cities, Food-Energy-Water Nexus, environmental modeling, science-policy linkages, India

Zhiyong Jason Ren

Water-Energy Nexus; Environmental Technologies; Waste Treatment; Resource Recovery; Microbial Electrochemistry

Gabriele Villarini

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…

Claire White

Sustainable Cements; CO2 Capture and Utilization; Disordered Materials: Multiscale Modeling and Characterization

Mark Zondlo

Atmospheric Chemistry and Composition Group