People we take pride in

PI Jeffrey R. Koseff

Jeff Koseff, founding co-director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, is an expert in the interdisciplinary domain of environmental fluid mechanics. His research falls in the interdisciplinary domain of environmental fluid mechanics and focuses on the interaction between physical and biological systems in natural aquatic environments. Current research activities are in the general area of environmental fluid mechanics and focus on: turbulence and internal wave dynamics in stratified flows, coral reef and sea-grass hydrodynamics, the role of natural systems in coastal protection, and flow through terrestrial and marine canopies. Most recently he has begun to focus on the interaction between gravity currents and breaking internal waves in the near-coastal environment, and the transport of marine microplastics. Koseff was formerly the Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Senior Associate Dean of Engineering at Stanford, and has served on the Board of Governors of The Israel Institute of Technology, and has been a member of the Visiting Committees of the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at Carnegie-Mellon University, The Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, and Cornell University. He has also been a member of review committees for the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, The WHOI-MIT Joint Program, and the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment. He is a former member of the Independent Science Board of the Bay/Delta Authority. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015, and received the Richard Lyman Award from Stanford University in the same year. In 2020 he was elected as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. See here for a full list of his publications. Koseff also serves as the Faculty Athletics Representative to the Pac-12 and NCAA for Stanford.

Current & recent students, and postdocs

Hayoon Chung

Hayoon is a new post-doctoral scholar in our group. She graduated with a PhD from our own lab in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. She is an experimentalist who studies flow over vegetation and the motion of amber in natural wildfires. After finishing her BS at MIT, she happily returned to California where persimmons grow.

Jenny Hamilton

Jenny is a PhD student in her fourth year. She graduated with a BS from Tufts University, and she now studies how wavey flows affect coral reefs. Jenny likes to hike, rock climb, and eat ice cream. She is co-advised by Prof. Stephen Monismith.

Paul Yi

Paul Yi is a final-year graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, jointly advised by Jeffrey Koseff and Ali Mani. He spent his childhood in the American South (Georgia and Alabama) after moving from South Korea, and he received his undergraduate degree in Geosciences in 2017 from Princeton University. His current research focuses on turbulence in the presence of stable density stratification with a particular focus on how passive and stratifying scalars are mixed by the turbulent flow. He enjoys working with pencil and paper and running numerical simulations, and he hopes to better understand and bridge how the engineering and geophysics communities model the various length and time scales of turbulent flows. In his free time, Paul enjoys playing the violin and erging.

Laura Clark

Laura Clark graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in English and a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering. As a Ph.D. student at Stanford, she experimentally investigates how microplastics are transported by ocean waves. Outside of the lab, she enjoys hiking, reading, and boogie boarding in waves larger than those in the laboratory flume. She is co-advised by Prof. Nick Ouellette.

Saksham Gakhar

Saksham Gakhar is a recent PhD graduate from our lab, co-advised by Prof. Nick Ouellette. He is currently working as a Research Data Scientist at Meta Platforms by day, and as a lecturer at Washington State University by night. Prior to joining Stanford in 2017, he graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India with a Bachelor of Technology (with Honors) in Mechanical Engineering and Minor in Computer Science and Engineering. He is motivated by the problem of bathymetric inversion. His research focuses on understanding the physical connection between a bedform and its free-surface signature in shallow turbulent flows such as in fluvial, estuarine, and coastal environments.

Yuki Tanimoto

Yuki Tanimoto is a graduate student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He graduated from Tufts University in 2014 with a BS in Environmental Engineering, and got his MS in Environmental Engineering at Stanford University in 2018. Prior to coming to Stanford, he worked as a Water Quality Modeler at HDR Inc (formally HydroQual Inc), working with hydrodynamic, sediment transport, eutrophication, and organic-toxics partitioning models on public and private projects. His current research focuses on the interaction between dense gravity currents and internal waves in the near-coastal environment. He enjoys playing ultimate frisbee, spending time in the mountains, and good coffee with cold milk.

Alumni

See here for a list of the group’s alumni with their last known coordinates.