Research Program

Hydraulic & hydrological processes across the terrestrial–aquatic interface

The FLUX Lab combines mechanistic numerical modeling with advanced computational and observational technologies to solve environmental challenges in both natural and engineered systems. The research program is organized into three interconnected thrusts.

Conceptual diagram of the FLUX Lab's research: water, sediment, heat, and solutes moving across surface water and subsurface — from rivers and the hyporheic zone to coasts, groundwater, saltwater intrusion, and the critical zone — linking hydrology, morphology, biogeochemistry, thermal energy, and ecology from water and dissolved oxygen to salinity, ecosystem function, and sustainability.
Connecting surface water and subsurface — from rivers and the hyporheic zone to coasts and the critical zone — to link physical, biogeochemical, thermal, and ecological processes that shape water quality, ecosystem function, and long-term sustainability.
01

Multi-scale Modeling of the Coastal & Terrestrial Critical Zone

This research integrates critical-zone processes into a coupled hydro-biogeochemical-ecological modeling framework. By synthesizing surface–subsurface flow, sediment morphodynamics, and reactive-transport dynamics, the lab quantifies how natural hazards — such as floods, droughts, and hurricanes — drive ecological responses and long-term ecosystem health.

  • Innovation: leveraging remote-sensing data, GIS, and field measurement to constrain large-scale models, ensuring they accurately reflect ecosystem response and resilience across diverse terrains.
02

Sustainable Human-Water Systems

This research examines how human decision-making — in urban development, land use, and renewable-energy infrastructure — reshapes surface runoff, groundwater recharge, and nutrient cycles, and how those changes feed back to water quality, stormwater management, and the sustainability of coupled human-water systems.

  • Innovation: combining process-based models with data-driven architectures to build robust, interpretable tools for stormwater management and infrastructure/ecosystem resilience.
03

Environmental Fluid Mechanics at the Terrestrial–Aquatic Interface

This research characterizes nutrient mass transfer and momentum exchange across the sediment–water interface, with particular attention to the effects of aquatic vegetation, animal activity, and pollutants on bedform evolution and benthic fluxes.

  • Innovation: combining environmental fluid mechanics with laboratory/field measurement and AI-driven surrogate models to identify the mixing and exchange processes governing the fate of emerging contaminants such as PFAS and microplastics in riverine and coastal hyporheic zones.

Approach

From high-performance computing to field observation

Mechanistic modeling

Process-based CFD, hydrologic, and transport models — from pore- and hyporheic-zone physics to watershed and critical-zone scales.

Data & machine learning

Remote sensing, GIS, and data-driven / machine-learning approaches to constrain and accelerate large-scale simulations.

Observation

Laboratory flume experiments and field measurement to ground models in real systems and close the loop between theory and data.

Foundations

Where the work comes from

The lab's program builds on a decade of research connecting surface and subsurface waters: large-scale hydrodynamic and water-quality modeling of urban waterways (EFDC); a multi-scale framework for sediment oxygen demand and dissolved-oxygen dynamics coupling hyporheic mass transfer (OpenFOAM) with benthic biogeochemistry (CrunchFlow); development of the MODFLOW 6 groundwater energy transport (GWE) package with the U.S. Geological Survey; and current work on groundwater–surface-water interaction, saltwater intrusion, marsh migration, and wave-driven bedform/solute exchange.

See publications →