Prospective students

I am active in recruiting graduate students (MS and PhD). Potential students can send me an email with your CV and transcripts. 

Current students

Skye Bensel

Skye is from Wyoming. She is a Master student in Hydrologic Sciences Program. Her research focuses on the seasonal variations of subsurface water storage (soil moisture and rock moisture) and their interaction with snowmelt. Her thesis uses geophysical and hydrologic field methods.

Surani Liyanage

Surani is from Sri Lanka. She is a Master student in Geophysics program. Her thesis research focuses on the electrical properties (electrical resistivity and induced polarization) of regolith samples. She uses laboratory instruments to measure these properties under controlled hydrologic conditions (matric suction).

Zihao Zhang

Zihao is currently a PhD student in Geoscience Program. He is from China and got his MS degree from Central South University. His thesis research focuses on the integrated modeling of deep hydrothermal systems and shallow critical zones. In particular, the geophysical signatures of the entire system will be simulated in a coupled way. 

Joshua Kietzmann 

Joshua is from Minnesota and will join us as a PhD student in Geophysics this fall (2024). His thesis will focue on the hydrologic modeling of hydrologic systems. He will develop appropirate upscale method to apply geophysics-informed hydrologic modeling from catchment scale to watershed scales. 

Past students

Jing Xie

Jing was a PhD student at Central South University, China (currently a postdoc at Peking University). He was visiting our group from Dec 2019 to Dec 2021. His study was focused on developing a stochastic inversion scheme for estimating unsaturated properties from transient measurements (soil matric suction and self-potential during drainage tests)

Courtney McDavid

Courtney is from Kentucky and is currently working in AECOM. She was in our MS in Geophysics program from 2021/08 to 2023/08. In her thesis research, she studied the self-potential signals of vadose zone hydrologic processes using laboratory soil column tests. She defended her thesis in August 2023. 

Hang Chen

Hang is from China and is currently working as a postdoc at Lawrance Berkley National Lab. He was in our PhD in Geophysics program from 2020/09 to 2024/05. Summary of his thesis research: (1) developed geophysics-informed hydrologic modeling (i.e., incorporating seismic-derived critical zone architecture into hydrologic modeling, (2) improved resistivity inversion by imposing realistic spatial regularization, (3) formularized a hydrologic constraint for time-lapse resistivity inversion, and (4) analyzed the subsurface structure influence on water partitioning in mountainous catchment. 

Taylor Bienvenue

Taylor is from Montana and is currently working in Pioneer Technical Services, Inc. He was an MS student in the Hydrologic Science program from 2019/09 to 2021/08. In his thesis study, he developed an integrated soil column system that can measure both the electrical and hydraulic properties of saturated and unsaturated soils. His thesis can be found at https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/td/1860/