Leadership
Director:
Ana P Barros
Deputy Director:
Ximing Cai
Managing Director:
Ana Pinheiro Privette
Administrative Director:
Jennifer J Bishop
Faculty
Alex Tartakovsky
Alex Tartakovsky’s research interests are at the intersection of flow and transport of contaminants, groundwater-surface water interactions and scientific machine learning. His studies contribute to parameter estimation, multiscale modeling, uncertainty quantification, physics-informed machine learning, and pore-scale multiphase flow and reactive transport.
Ana P. Barros
Ana P. Barros conducts research on mountain hydrology and hydrometeorology including aerosols, cloud and precipitation processes across scales; land-atmosphere interactions; vegetation dynamics; and soil-vegetation-water cycle interactions in land-margin environments using field and lab experiments and high-resolution process-resolving models. A major component of her research is on microwave remote sensing developing retrieval algorithms for radars and radiometers with a focus on retrieval algorithms, data assimilation and data integration of snowpack, precipitation, and clouds. Her group has been using Machine Learning methods for improving precipitation, floods, and drought prediction for merging data since the mid-1990s’. Examples of current work include coupled LES-aerosol-cloud-precipitation interaction modeling, SAR measurements of seasonal snow and data-assimilation, dynamic root modeling, and physics-guided AI applications to flash-flood forecasting.
Ashlynn Stillwell
The Stillwell Research Group focuses on creating sustainable water and energy systems in a policy-relevant context through research in built environment water-energy sustainability, electricity-water interactions, green stormwater infrastructure, and energy-water-carbon policy analysis.
Francina Dominguez
Francina Dominguez is a hydroclimatologist. Her work is focused on the interactions between the land and the atmosphere, and more specifically, on changes in hydrology and climate due to human modification of the land surface and greenhouse gas emissions. The two primary lines of research in her group look at land-atmosphere interaction from two perspectives: 1) the effect of climate variability and change, primarily extreme events, on surface hydrology and 2) the effect of changes in surface hydrology on climate.
Glenn Heistand
Research at CHAMP involves hydrologic and hydraulic modeling to understand trends, urbanization effects, stormwater management, mitigation, and climate change impacts on flooding. We develop Natural Hazard Mitigation Plans for communities, structure-based risk assessments, and update Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs). A key aspect of our work is engaging with stakeholders through FEMA’s Risk MAP Program to help communities reduce flood risk. We also produce digital mapping products such as depth grids, flood frequency maps, and inundation maps to provide accurate flood hazard data, facilitate communication, and ultimately help reduce flood damages in Illinois communities.”
Website: https://illinoisfloodmaps.org/
Hadi Meidani
Hadi Meidani conducts research in computational modeling of complex systems. In his focus on transportation systems, he develops advanced computational tools that can handle high dimensionality, couplings and complex spatiotemporal patterns. His research is at the intersection of uncertainty quantification, scientific computing, and graph neural networks.
Lei Zhao
Lei Zhao’s research concerns the physical and engineering processes in the atmospheric boundary layer where most human activities and environmental systems are concentrated, with a particular focus on built surfaces and urban environments. He combines theory, numerical modeling, remote sensing and in situ observations, and cutting-edge machine learning methods to study land-atmosphere interaction and environmental fluid mechanics that relate to urban climatology and hydrology, urban climate change, impacts, and adaptation. Lei is the recipient of the U.S. NSF CAREER Award, the Timothy Oke Award (2023) from the International Association for Urban Climate, and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Global Environmental Change Early Career Award (2023). He received his Ph.D. degree in atmospheric physics from Yale University and B.S. degree from Nanjing University. Before joining at UIUC, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.
Marcelo H. Garcia
Marcelo Garcia’s interests are in fluvial hydraulics, sediment transport, environmental hydrodynamics, and water resources engineering. His group developed hydrologic and hydraulic models to predict urban flooding and the performance of the “Deep Tunnel” during extreme rainfall events in Chicago, Illinois. A 3D hydrodynamic model of the Chicago River was used to assess the water quality conditions in the Chicago Area Waterway System (CAWS). Applied work has focused on improving the performance of stormwater management and wastewater treatment infrastructure with the help of computational techniques to protect Chicago’s waterways and Lake Michigan, the main source of fresh water for Northeastern Illinois.
Megan Konar
Megan Konar conducts policy-relevant research that focuses on the intersection of water, food, and trade. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing from hydrology, statistics, and economics. She applies a range of quantitative tools in her research, such as hydrologic modeling, data analytics, and network analysis. Megan’s research seeks to understand the relationship between water resources and food supply chains. She is interested in understanding how food supply chains impact water use and sustainability, as well as the exposure of agri-food supply chains to water risk, including long-term water stress and shorter-term water hazards.
Megan L. Matthews
Megan Mathews’ work involves developing multiscale models and tools to identify plant engineering and management strategies to sustainably improve the security and equity of global food, water, and environmental systems. She uses mechanistic and data-driven approaches to develop models describing plant processes at and across regulatory, metabolic, and physiological scales, and integrating these processes within the larger biogeochemical systems including the water and carbon cycles. By integrating information across multiple levels of biological organization, Megan uses systems-level perspectives to study impacts to plant growth under changing climates and identify plant engineering and management approaches that have potential to address global challenges related to food security, environmental sustainability, and climate change mitigation.
Mohamad Alipour
Mohamad Alipour specializes in remote sensing big data analytics in natural and built environments for condition assessment and natural hazard mitigation. His work uses multimodal sensing data, including optical, passive, and active microwave sensing, for surface and subsurface evaluation. This includes the development of probabilistic inverse methods, deep learning, and physics-informed machine learning techniques for information extraction from sensing data. His active projects are focused on estimating and mapping soil and vegetation moisture using data from unmanned aerial systems and satellites for wildfire and drought risk assessment and monitoring.
Murugesu Sivapalan (Siva)
Murugesu Sivapalan conducts research aimed at advancing hydrologic predictions at the catchment scale by addressing three major challenges to extrapolation: (i) across space (i.e., small to large) scales; (ii) across places (i.e., across geographic gradients); and (iii) across time (e.g., under physical and social change). Hydrologic understanding is gained through analyzing observed space-time variability of rainfall-streamflow-water quality processes and interpreting them through hydrologic models, both bottom-up and top-down, that accommodate underlying climate-soil-vegetation-topography-human system feedbacks. Model predictions are then used to assess water security, i.e., water quantity and water quality, including extremes, under alternative scenarios of human development.
Na Wei
Na Wei conducts research to understand and manipulate microbial systems at the molecular level for beneficial applications towards environmental sustainability. Her research lies at the interface of environmental engineering and synthetic and systems biology, with interests in 1) Waste-to-value and resource recovery including plastic depolymerization and upcycling, rare earth elements recovery, and phosphorus recovery, 2) Renewable biocatalysis for water reclamation and reuse, and 3) pathogen biosensing and disease control to protect public health. Her research uses molecular biology techniques, synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, protein engineering, AI/machine learning to solve emerging environmental problems.
Nora El-Gohary
Nora El-Gohary’s research focuses on data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) for the development and operation of sustainable buildings and infrastructure systems, including energy and water systems. Her research advances the methods and techniques for (1) extracting information from unstructured data sources using natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning; (2) aligning and linking data with different representations, in heterogeneous formats, and from multiple sources to move from isolated data to fully-integrated multi-source predictive analytics; (3) enabling adaptive and advanced analytics and machine learning strategies to address data scarcity and quality challenges; and (4) integrating the human element in the analytics to take the people, their behaviors, and their responses and interactions with the built environment into consideration.
Paolo Gardoni
Paolo Gardoni is the Alfredo H. Ang Family Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Reliability Engineering and System Safety, and the founder and former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure. His research interests include probabilistic mechanics; reliability, risk and life cycle analysis; decision-making under uncertainty; performance assessment of deteriorating systems; modeling of natural hazards and societal impact; ethical, social and legal dimensions of risk; optimal strategies for natural hazard mitigation and disaster recovery; and engineering ethics. Prof. Gardoni is the 2021 recipient of the Alfredo Ang Award on Risk Analysis and Management of Civil Infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers for his contributions to risk, reliability, and resilience analysis, and his leadership in these fields.
Praveen Kumar
Rafael O. Tinoco
Rafael Tinoco leads the Ecohydraulics and Ecomorphodynamics Laboratory at CEE. His research group investigates flow-biota-sediment interactions across scales, to understand fundamental hydrodynamic and morphodynamic processes to address challenges from invasive and endangered aquatic species, elucidate transport processes across aquatic ecosystems, develop process-based assessments of nature-based infrastructure, and characterize the resilience of fluvial and coastal communities.
Roland Cusick
Dr. Roland D. Cusick is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Cusick’s research integrates experimentation and modeling of bioenergy, water, and wastewater treatment technologies across multiple scales to establish mechanistic links between micro-scale physical and chemical processes and system-scale performance metrics. They also develop system-scale models to extend these linkages to national and global scale resource inventories and long-term economic and environmental outcomes. Their recent work has elucidated the dramatic potential for centralized biorefinery infrastructure to increase the biocircularity of nutrients while alleviated manure application constraints in the agricultural watersheds of the Midwest.
Thanh Huong (Helen) Nguyen
Helen Nguyen leads a research group focusing on pathogen transmission and control, especially by harnessing the power of genomic technology to solve environmental health problems. Besides several projects based in the US, her group has conducted research in developing countries on human resilience to waterborne infectious disease outbreaks related to extreme natural events. Her group has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers on a wide range of topics related to pathogen control and detection, the human health impact of water reuse, food safety, impacts of the extreme flood on pathogen spreading, pathogens in drinking water distribution systems, and water quality after natural disasters. She has led multiple interdisciplinary projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Department of Agriculture.
Timothy D. Stark
Timothy D. Stark’s interests are in water containment, conveyance, treatment, hydropower, and integration with other renewable power systems. In particular, his research is focused on: (1) more efficient and protective containment systems including capturing floodwaters, (2) improving the economics of hydropower using innovative reservoir systems, solar power, abandoned mines, and coal fired power plants, (3) decreasing evapotranspiration and increasing the reliability of conveyance systems, and (4) developing local treatment systems for grey water so the resulting water can be used for closed loop hydropower generation and during droughts.
Tugce Baser
Vishal Verma
Vishal Verma’s research focuses on characterizing the ROS-active and toxic components of PM2.5, identifying their emission sources, and quantifying those responsible for potentially inducing the most adverse health effects. The bulk of his efforts toward this overall goal has been working with Ph.D. and M.S. students on three major thrusts: 1) investigating the role of aerosol composition in ROS activity and PM2.5 toxicity; 2) developing online and automated instruments for measuring the ROS activity of ambient PM2.5; and 3) creating novel chemical and cellular endpoints for measuring the PM-induced ROS and toxicity. The outcome of these on-going and proposed studies will ultimately lead to re-envisioning the current mass-based standards to include critical properties of the ambient PM2.5 that impact human health.
Ximing Cai
Ximing Cai conducts research on water resources systems analysis, with a focus on coupled hydrology-human systems. He has been developing and applying systems approaches and data-driven methods to various water resources management problems, including food-energy-water nexus, river basin management, reservoir operation, drought management, and interdependent infrastructure system planning. His work emphasizes interdisciplinary research by connecting hydrology and economics for understanding environmental and water resources systems complexity and developing water management policies and solutions.
Yanfeng Ouyang
Yanfeng Ouyang’s research focuses on modeling transportation, logistics, and infrastructure systems and developing applications in civil, energy, and agricultural industries. His work generates mathematical models and computational tools to (i) reveal basic operational characteristics of complex transportation systems that are of significant social and economic importance; and (ii) develop planning schemes and management strategies to enhance the service reliability, efficiency, resilience, and sustainability of such systems.
Yu-Feng Lin
Dr. Yu-Feng Forrest Lin is the Director of Illinois Water Resources Center, a Principal Research Hydrogeologist at the Prairie Research Institute, a Clinical Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Research Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his B.S. in water resources and environmental engineering from Tamkang University in Taiwan (1993), M.S. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Connecticut (1996), and Ph.D. in geological engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2002). Lin is a licensed Professional Geoscientist and certified Geographic Information Systems Professional. In 2006, Lin became a Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Lin has devoted his efforts to serving professional communities. He is presently the Executive Editor for Groundwater, published by the National Ground Water Association. He became the Geological Society of America Fellow in 2018. He also serves as a university representative to the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) funded by the NSF, and as a delegate on the Universities Council on Water Resources (UCOWR). He has been a Commissioner at the Great Lakes Commission appointed by the Governor of Illinois since 2020. Lin’s current research interests include: (1) groundwater and geothermal resources, (2) thermal transport across interfaces, (3) groundwater and surface water interactions, and (4) fiber-optic distributed temperature sensing (FO-DTS) applications.
Zhenxing Zhang
Zhenxing Zhang focuses on developing holistic approaches to sustainable water resources planning and management, and to better understand the uncertainty involved with forecasting hydrologic phenomena and planning water resources. My research primarily encompasses the areas of low streamflow hydrology, watershed hydrology, prediction in ungauged basins, water resources systems analysis, stochastic and deterministic hydrologic modelling, water resources systems, water-energy nexus and multi-objective optimizations.