Environmental fluid dynamics with a focus on turbulent mixing and its implications for coastal oceanography.
Research Area
My research looks into the impact of fluid dynamics on some of the most pressing questions in environmental and climate science. As most air and water masses are stratified in density, their motion and the transport of heat and chemical elements are governed by stratified turbulence. This is an exciting research area I have been working on with a combination of laboratory experiments and modelling.
Water is the new gold. I am particularly interested in estuaries, which are key transition and exchange zones between the land and ocean and often host great cities, including London. Sea-level rise, industrialisation and pollution put estuaries under pressure, threatening the sustainability of essential services they provide, such as water filtration, biodiversity, irrigation, aquaculture and tourism. Around the world, low-lying deltas of global importance are prone to increasingly frequent salinity intrusions that disrupt the water supply, agriculture and shipping.
One of the least understood physics of estuaries is turbulent mixing, which controls not only salinity, essential to water quality and ecosystems, but also the dispersion of passive pollutants, microplastics, key dissolved gases and the growth of harmful pathogens as global temperatures rise. There is scope for an exciting PhD in this area.
Project Interests
I would be interested in co-developing a mathematically exciting and impactful project in estuarine and environmental science. One topic is the turbulent mixing between freshwater and saltwater around complex river bathymetry, e.g. islets, bends, and constrictions or expansions. Another topic is the mixing of salt in the oligohaline zone, i.e. at low salinities close to the drinking water threshold, where current models break down. Other topics are possible. There is scope to perform new idealised laboratory experiments, numerical modelling and even analyse field data shared by collaborators.