New faces in the lab

Laurent Pfister is here for a six-week stint from Centre de Recherche Public – Gabriel Lippmann in Luxembourg, where he is the head of the Geohydrosystems and Landuse Management Unit. He is an experimental hydrologist, working on new tools to map connectivity in the hillslope-riparian-stream system using terrestrial diatoms and infrared imagery. We’re excited about pursuing some of these tools in our work here.

Miguel Barrios is a professor in forest engineering at the Universidad del Tolima in Colombia, where he works on deterministic and stochastic modeling of hydrological processes. During his summer-long visit here, Miguel will be developing a research proposal to address the effects of land use changes on the spatial and temporal distribution of water resources in a tropical Andean environment.

Ali Ameli is taking a one-month break from his PhD studies at the University of Waterloo to work here on applying overland flow modeling techniques to subsurface stormflow simulation. His PhD, with James Craig in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is on semi-analytical methods for simulating groundwater-surface water interactions.

Finally, last but not least, Sandra Timsic has recently joined the lab for a post-doc position. She is finishing up her PhD in the Department of Geological Sciences here at the U of S on palaeo-climate reconstruction using stable isotopes. She will be primarily working on developing and testing new cryogenic extraction techniques for isotope analysis.

We kicked off their visits with a welcome-to-the-lab coffee session… here’s to many more coffee sessions and fruitful discussions!