Affiliate Scientists

Patrick Belmont, Utah State University

Patrick is an assistant professor in the Department of Watershed Sciences at Utah State University. His research focuses on hydrology and process geomorphology with a focus on sediment transport and geochemical fingerprinting techniques to quantify erosion, sediment transport, and storage within river basins. Ongoing projects include: Developing a sediment budget and routing model for the Le Sueur River, southern Minnesota; Using cosmogenic nuclides to understand erosional processes in the Lemhi Range, eastern Idaho and Death Valley, California; Understanding the relationships between turbidity, total suspended sediment, fluvial grain size distributions, and spectral light attenuation in rivers; and Studying floodplain evolution in response to rapid changes in baselevel: a natural experiment in southern Minnesota.

Federico Falcini, Satellite Oceanography Group

Federico Falcini is a Researcher at the Satellite Oceanography Group (GOS) of the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). He has a large variety of interests in Geophisical Fluid Dynamics and Sediment Transport, from theoretical physical oceanography to geomorphology. He recently applied theoretical techniques in seeking to describe different river sedimentation patterns in delta environments, formulating a novel method for predicting flow and sediment transport conditions that lead to the formation of elongate channels such as the Mississippi Birdsfoot. He is currently coordinating a multidisciplinary team composed by oceanographers, sedimentologists, and geomorphologists for the sedimentological investigation of the historic 2011 Mississippi River flood. The project aims to determine the impact of a geologically significant flood event on coastal sedimentation patterns and rates.

Federico has been an NCED synthesis postdoctoral researcher at SAFL, where he worked on both theoretical and experimental approaches that seek to relate the internal fluid flow properties (e.g., shearing and vorticity) with sediment advection/diffusion processes, and thus the related morphodynamics. He also theoretically investigated the role of non-locality versus non-linearity in the sediment transport models.

At ISAC-CNR he is working on coastal and offshore remote sensing analysis for environmental, geomorphological, and sediment transport studies in the Mediterranean Sea. Website

Nicole Gasparini, Tulane University

Nicole is a geomorphologist interested in landscape evolution over short and long time scales and small and large spatial scales. Many of her projects have explored the interactions among climate, tectonics and erosion. Nicole’s main research tool is the CHILD numerical landscape evolution model (find CHILD at CSDMS). Nicole uses CHILD to quantify the signature of different physical processes – fluvial, climatic and/or tectonic - in a landscape and also to gain a better understanding of the timing and magnitude of the dominant processes controlling landscape evolution in different settings across the globe. All of her modeling work is supported with field data and/or DEM data.

Nicole is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Tulane University. She is currently working with colleagues studying landscape evolution in the Beni watershed in the Bolivian Andes, the Dadu watershed on the Eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, and the Clearwater watershed in the Olympic Peninsula, USA. Her student’s projects include: Quantifying landscape evolution across a precipitation gradient in the Kohala Peninsula, Hawaii; Measuring river response to faulting in southeastern Louisiana; Exploring the processes controlling slow moving landslides in southeastern Italy.

Nicole is a new member of the NCED family. She has recently begun to explore source to sink systems, and hopes to collaborate with other NCED scientists. She is also working to turn her many conversations with Kyle Straub into numerical and/or laboratory experiments in the near future. website

Leslie Hopkinson, West Virginia University

Leslie is an Assistant Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at West Virginia University. Her research focus is in surface hydrology, streambank stability, and vegetation-fluid interactions. She believes that her research will lead to new methods for analyzing streambank stability as well as improvements in practical field methods in stream restoration design. Current projects include a flume study examining the effectiveness of a stream restoration planting scheme and field studies examining the process of streambank erosion as it is influenced by vegetation roughness and changes in the storm hydrograph.

Leslie has interacted with NCED researchers through both the Summer Institute on Earth-surface Dynamics and the Visitor’s Program. She attended the 2010 NCED Summer Institute on Earth-surface Dynamics where she built relationships with early-career scientists and learned skills to incorporate in her teaching, research and outreach. In the NCED Visitor’s Program, she had the opportunity to visit St. Anthony Falls Laboratory and complete research in the area of stream restoration. website

Leslie Hsu, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Leslie is a postdoctoral researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Her most recent research interest is in geoinformatics - exploring how to maximize data accessibility and reusability. She is part of the Integrated Earth Data Applications (IEDA) research group, which develops and maintains databases and tools for solid earth geoscience.  Leslie is a geomorphologist who studies granular flows such as debris flows, rockfalls, and bedload transport. She studies the interaction of granular flows with their boundaries using measurements from force plates and broadband seismometers in order to infer processes at the boundary.

Leslie received her B.A. in 2000 from Harvard University, her M.S. in 2002 from University of Arizona, and her Ph.D in 2010 from University of California, Berkeley. Her PhD dissertation, Bedrock erosion by granular flows, was an NCED-funded project, and she has worked closely with NCED PIs William Dietrich (UC Berkeley) and Kimberly Hill (University of Minnesota). In 2010 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Noah Finnegan (former NCED synthesis postdoc) on the seismic signature of bedload transport. Currently, Leslie has joined with fellow NCED-trained scientists Wonsuck Kim (UT Austin) and Brandon McElroy (U Wyoming) to initiate a community effort on data and tool sharing among experimental scientists. website

Douglas J. Jerolmack, University of Pennsylvania

Doug's research focuses on the spatial and temporal evolution of patterns that emerge at the interface of fluid and sediment on Earth and planetary surfaces. Scales of interest range from ripples and dunes evolving over minutes in sandy rivers, to the preserved record of millions of years of coastal evolution on the continental shelf. Doug iterates between mathematical modeling, laboratory experiments and field observations in order to elucidate the minimum number of ingredients that are required to explain physical phenomena. While his interests are wide ranging, they share a common theme: to understand the internally-generated dynamics of sedimentary systems, to characterize the response of these complex systems to changes in boundary conditions such as climate, and to develop methods for accurately separating the two signals. Current experiments in the Penn Sediment Dynamics Laboratory are exploring channel formation and migration on alluvial fans and deltas, river mouth sedimentation patterns in deltas and lakes, and granular mechanics of steep rivers. Theoretical work on stochastic sediment transport is now being applied to a new field campaign in Puerto Rico as part of the NSF-funded Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory, led by Penn.

As Doug was part of the inaugural cohort of NCED PhD students, and was also an NCED synthesis post doc, he has strong relationships and interactions with most of NCED. Doug has ongoing collaborations with Efi Foufoula and her students on the stochastic nature of erosion and deposition processes, with Chris Paola on how these stochastic dynamics shape the sedimentary record, and with Vaughan Voller on modeling granular dynamics. His research on deltas was inspired by the NCED Deltas group, and results from a current NSF-funded project will contribute to NCED's study of the Mississippi Delta. He has a pending NSF proposal with NCED Affiliate Scientist Rina Schumer on physical and mathematical modeling of stratigraphy resulting from stochastic surface dynamics. Doug also takes part in NCED annual meetings, and sends undergraduate and graduate students to SAFL for REUs and laboratory research. website

Melissa Kenney, University of Maryland

Dr. Melissa A. Kenney is Research Faculty in Environmental Decision Analysis at the University of Maryland, Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) and Lead Principal Investigator of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) National Climate Assessment Indicator System. Her research in environmental decision analysis broadly addresses how to integrate both scientific knowledge and societal values into policy decision-making under uncertainty.  This research is inherently multidisciplinary, drawing on the fields of decision theory, environmental sciences, and public policy.  This research addresses a range of topics including global change indicators, nutrient criteria setting, non-market benefits of nutrient reductions, cost-benefit analysis of urban stream restoration, scale of economies and diseconomies in coastal restoration, adaptive environmental decision making for complex systems, model-based bias correction factors for expert elicitation surveys, and value of information of indicators.  These projects were published in a range of referred journals and reports and funded by National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS), Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF), National Water Research Institute (NWRI), and Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results (EPA STAR). From 2010-2012, Dr. Kenney was a Research Assistant Scientist at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering and an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow hosted by the NOAA Climate Program Office and the USGCRP, National Climate Assessment. During her AAAS fellowship, Dr. Kenney coordinated the development of 1) the physical, ecological, and societal indicator framework for National Climate Assessment, 2) transboundary climate adaptation and sustained assessment services in the Columbia River and Pacific Northwest, and 3) enhanced collaboration between NOAA and the National Science Foundation, Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate. Among her significant honors are Lead Author for the Decision Support Chapter of the 2013 National Climate Assessment (2012-2013), Sigma Xi Fresh Faces (2011), National Water Research Institute Fellowship (2006, 2007), Morris K. and Stuart L. Udall Scholar for Environmental Policy and Leadership (2001), National Winner of FFA Soil and Water Management Proficiency Award (1999). Melissa received a B.A. with Distinction in Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in Water Quality Modeling and Decision Analysis in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University, and was a postdoctoral scholar with the NSF National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics at The Johns Hopkins University. website

Wonsuck Kim, University of Texas, Austin

Wonsuck graduated from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2007. His PhD thesis focused on understanding coupled fluvial and shoreline dynamics using physical flume experiments and theoretical work, under the supervision of Dr. Chris Paola. He is now an assistant professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin. His Morphodynamics and Quantitative Stratigraphy group seeks to advance our understanding of "fossilized dynamics", stratigraphic responses to sediment transport processes and imposed boundary conditions in fluviodeltaic systems. His team is also running a unique flume facility that provides a computer-controlled basement subsidence, which is one of the only three experimental basins in the world. website

Laurel Larsen, U.S. Geological Survey

Laurel is an assistant professor of Earth Systems Science in the Geography Department at UC Berkeley. As a hydroecologist, her primary research interests lie in understanding feedback processes and nonlinear behavior in flowing aquatic ecosystems and in using that understanding to predict how ecosystem services will respond to environmental change. With a background in environmental fluid mechanics and systems science and mathematics, Laurel is both an experimentalist and a modeler. Her experiments primarily focus on understanding how flow fosters the bi-directional exchange of energy and materials between organisms and the physical environment. She then uses modeling as a tool to scale up findings from the field in space and time and to understand how landscapes and ecosystems will respond to new sets of environmental drivers. Laurel’s projects include work on biogeomorphic processes involved in forming and maintaining regular landscape patterning in the Everglades; understanding the linkages between geomorphology, flow, sediment transport, benthic metabolism, and water quality in restored and unrestored suburban streams; and the linkage between hydrological connectivity of surface-water bodies, large-scale fluxes, and landscape change.

Laurel first became involved with NCED through her attendance of the short course on the geomorphology of low-gradient sand bed streams in 2006. Since then, she has enjoyed many productive conversations with NCED scientists and attended the NCED retreat in 2010. website

Anne Lightbody, University of New Hampshire

Anne is a new Assistant Professor at the University of New Hampshire. Her research focuses on flow and transport within surface water systems, including rivers, streams, lakes, fresh-water wetlands, and salt-water marshes. She is particularly interested in coupling improved understanding of small-scale physical processes to larger scale modeling and prediction. This work is fundamental yet also has clear applications, reaching into real-world management issues including stream restoration, constructed treatment wetland design, aquaculture, and suspended sediment pollution control. In addition, it is at the interface of fluid mechanics, geomorphology, and ecology.

Anne is a reformed plant ecologist (BS/MS Yale 1999) turned Civil and Environmental Engineer (PhD MIT 2007). From 2007 to 2010, she was a Research Associate at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, where she planned, developed, and began research within the Outdoor StreamLab, a National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics facility. Her research there combined the geomorphological and ecological aspects of river restoration and management. She recently joined the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of New Hampshire, where she is continuing laboratory and field investigations of flow and transport through turbulent boundary layers and aquatic canopies in fluvial and coastal settings.

As a member of the NCED family for several years, Anne benefited greatly from frequent interactions with established scientists who were willing to not only share their recent results but also point out the limits of scientific knowledge. She looks forward to continued interactions and research discussions with NCED PIs and other Affiliated Scientists. website

Paola Passalacqua, University of Texas at Austin

Paola graduated in 2002 from the University of Genoa, Italy, with a B.S./M.S. in Environmental Engineering. She joined the University of Minnesota as a graduate student in 2004 and completed a M.S. in 2005 in Water Resources with a thesis on landscape evolution modeling and subgrid-scale parameterization. During her PhD, which she completed in 2009, she focused on feature extraction from high resolution digital elevation data and developed a toolbox, called GeoNet, for the automatic extraction of channel network (released as free software through the NCED website). Following the completion of her PhD, she spent 2010 as a synthesis NCED post-doc at the University of Minnesota working on dynamics of environmental transport of river networks.

Paola joined the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor in 2011 where she continues her research program at the boundary between hydrology and geomorphology. Current projects include the analysis of correlation between drainage patterns, vegetation and climate, the development of automatic techniques for the extraction of deltaic patterns from satellite imagery and the theoretical analysis of the extracted networks, and flood elevation risk analysis. Paola enjoyed being a student and a post-doc within NCED and looks forward to continued interactions and collaborations with the PIs and Affiliate Scientists. She was an instructor in the NCED Summer Institute in 2009, 2010 and she is excited to participate again in 2011. website

Kyle Straub, Tulane University

Kyle graduated with his B.S. from Penn State University in 2002 and then completed his Ph.D. in Geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2007). Kyle's thesis at M.I.T. was focused on quantifying turbidity current interactions with topography. Following the completion of his Ph.D. he did postdoctoral work studying river deltas and the stratigraphy they produce at the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics at Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota. Kyle is currently an assistant professor at Tulane University in their department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. His research focuses on the transport of sediment from land through the ocean and into the stratigraphic record. He examines sediment transport using a combination of remote sensing techniques, carefully designed laboratory experiments, field studies of modern and ancient sedimentary transport systems, and targeted numerical analysis and modeling.

Kyle currently interacts with several members of NCED's Deltas program. Specifically he is collaborating with David Mohrig at the University of Texas at Austin on quantifying the subsurface architecture of the Mississippi Delta using industry-grade seismic data. In addition he is collaborating with Chris Paola at SAFL on developing statistical methods to invert stratigraphic architecture for paleo-surface dynamics. website

Paul Venturelli, University of Minnesota

Paul is an assistant professor of quantitative fisheries ecology in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota. His work combines experimentation, field data, modeling, and theory to focus on the life history and population dynamics of fishes that are of interest to fisheries, conservation, and restoration. Ongoing and upcoming projects include the use of growing degree-days to describe life history and predict sustainable rates of exploitation, an individual-based model for predicting the response of fish productivity to delta restoration, and induced nest failure as a mechanism for the control of invasive smallmouth bass.
Paul began to collaborate with members of the NCED team during his postdoctoral research at Louisiana State University. Working closely with NCED co-PI Robert Twilley and NCED alum Doug Edmonds, Paul developed a spatially explicit, individual-based fish model that incorporates results of a land-building model, historical water levels, and known vegetation patterns to predict how fish productivity varies through space and over time on a prograding delta. Paul is excited to continue in this vein as an NCED affiliate. In collaboration with other NCED scientists, he will work towards a fully-integrated, land-vegetation-fish model that can be used to identify productive delta habitat and evaluate different delta restoration scenarios. website

Jane Willenbring, University of Pennsylvania

Jane is a geomorphologist whose research focuses on developing and using new cosmogenic isotope techniques. Her work thus far has focused on questions related to glacial-interglacial cycle glacial erosion and chronology, the fluvial response to tectonic forcing, and erosional and depositional pulses that arise from changes in land use. Ongoing work in NCED field sites and with NCED affiliates and PIs involves understanding the timing of the erosional and depositional waves that propagate through river systems in N. California, determining the genesis and fate of post-settlement alluvium in river systems impacted by turbidity in S. Minnesota, constraining the biases associated with rate measurements made over different timescales in Florida and compiling global data sets of river sediment to the world's oceans.

Jane was an NCED synthesis postdoctoral researcher and is now an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She has continued interactions with many NCED researchers and has ongoing collaborations with many of her NCED cohorts including Wes Lauer (now at U. Seattle), Brandon McElroy (USGS), Patrick Belmont (U. Utah), and Nikki Strong (NCED and Smithsonian Inst.). She looks forward to continued interactions and research discussions with NCED students, PIs and other Affiliated Scientists. website