People
Principal Investigator
Nick Ouellette (CV) is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University and leads the Environmental Complexity Lab. He is broadly interested in the behavior of complex systems far from equilibrium, with a particular focus on dynamical self-organization. He seeks both to understand the physical principles governing the spontaneous emergence of low-dimensional structure in high-dimensional systems and to harness this self-organization for engineering applications. His research interests include turbulent flows in two and three dimensions (in both homogeneous and stratified fluids); the transport of inertial, anisotropic, and active particles in turbulence; fluid-driven erosion of granular beds and sediment transport; quantitative measurements of collective behavior in insect swarms and bird flocks; and emergent, self-organized structure and dynamics in cities.
Ouellette is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he spent seven years on the faculty in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University. He earned a B.A. in Physics and Computer Science from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University, and held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (with Eberhard Bodenschatz) and in the Physics Department at Haverford College (with Jerry Gollub). He teaches courses in fluid mechanics and nonlinear dynamics, and has won teaching awards at both Stanford and Yale.
Graduate Students
Erika MacDonald is a graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. She graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 2021 with a B.S. in General Engineering. Her current research focuses on the settling of hot particles.
Theodore MacMillan is a graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2021 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. His research involves leveraging graph-based approaches to better understand a variety of nonlinear systems, but especially environmental flows like those found in clouds and in the ocean.
Sophie Bodek is a graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 with a B.A. in Earth Sciences, then earned a M.S. in Geology from the University of Delaware in 2020. Her current research focuses on sediment transport, and she is broadly interested in connecting grain-scale sediment processes to landscape evolution.
Maya Eley is a graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. She graduated with a Bachelor of Civil Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2022. She is interested in the mechanisms behind large-scale sediment transport and erosion, and her current work is focused on sediment ripple formation and propagation in the presence of buried obstacles.
Shana Hartwick is a graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. She graduated from the Pennsylvania State University in 2024 with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. She is broadly interested in environmental multiphase flow, and her current research focuses on the transport of porous particles.
Alumni
with last known coordinates
Patricia Yang (postdoc), Assistant Professor of Power Mechanical Engineering at National Tsing Hua University.
Sarah Eagleman (postdoc), Director of Clinical Studies, Octave Bioscience.
Hangjian Ling (postdoc), Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
Kasper van der Vaart (postdoc).
Michael Sinhuber (postdoc), University of Oldenburg.
Abe Clark (postdoc), Associate Professor of Physics at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Charlie Hogg (postdoc), data scientist at Aruba.
Rui Ni (postdoc), Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
James Puckett (postdoc), Sr. Principal Systems Engineer, Northrop Grumman.
Doug Kelley (postdoc), Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Rochester.
Jennifer Yin (Ph.D. 2023, Stanford), Carbon Removal Scientist at Isometric.
Yenchia Feng (Ph.D. 2023, Stanford), AI Research Engineer at Distyl AI.
Laura Clark Sunberg (Ph.D. 2023, Stanford), Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Rohan Aras (Ph.D. 2022, Stanford), Data Scientist at the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology Laboratory.
Saksham Gakhar (Ph.D. 2022, Stanford), Research Data Scientist at Meta.
Marios Galanis (Ph.D. 2022, Stanford), Data Scientist at Meta.
Yuki Tanimoto (Ph.D. 2021, Stanford), Associate at McKinsey & Company.
Joseph Ballouz (Ph.D. 2020, Stanford), Senior Civil Engineer at Interfield Group.
Lei Fang (Ph.D. 2020, Stanford), Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.
Michelle DiBenedetto (Ph.D. 2019, Stanford), Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University.
J.C. Salevan (Ph.D. 2018, Yale), research analyst at Yale's Office of Institutional Research.
Alexandre de Chaumont Quitry (Ph.D. 2016, Yale), research engineer at Visby.
Yang Liao (Ph.D. 2015, Yale), Associate Scientist in Marine Geology and Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Nidhi Khurana (Ph.D. 2013, Yale), researcher at the Centers for Disease Control Global HIV program.
Manisha Patel (B.S. 2019, Stanford), graduate school in Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Pearson Miller (B.S. 2014, Yale), Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego.
Ben Green (B.S. 2014, Yale), Assistant Professor of Information at the University of Michigan.
Jerry Wang (B.S. 2013, Yale; McCrosky Prize winner), Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
Courtney Engle (B.S. 2012, Yale), in industry.
Kevin Shen (B.S. 2011, Yale), graduate school in Chemical Engineering at Caltech.
Sophia Merrifield (B.S. 2010, Yale; Lichty & Waters Prize winner), Associate Researcher in Physical Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.