Lab values
In the Water Resources Ecohydrology Lab, we work by a set of shared values, including:
Diversity
From who we are to the work we do, a diverse group will be required to create a sustainable water future. We welcome people from all backgrounds and with a variety of expertise, from physical hydrology to ecology to policy analysis to economics, to better understand how watersheds function and inform their management.
Collaboration
Watersheds and water resource systems are complex systems that involve interactions between physical, chemical, ecological, and human processes. We collaborate with colleagues to understand both individual system components and their joint behavior; we often use computational simulators as a platform for such collaboration.
Impact
Our work seeks to develop a more sustainable water supply that benefits both people and nature. Our work ranges from basic science seeking to understand watershed function to applications targeting landscape management, but the work is always in service of that desired future.
P. James Dennedy-Frank
P. James Dennedy-Frank leads the Water Resources Ecohydrology Lab (WRElab). James is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Marine & Environmental Sciences and Civil & Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. James completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. James also has a B.S. and M.S. in planetary science and industry experience at Flexible Liner Underground Technologies (FLUTe), a company that makes groundwater sampling systems.
James has strong interests in how we can best manage watersheds for the good of both people and nature. To accomplish this, James seeks to understand how watersheds function as systems and particularly how ecohydrological systems interact to change the flow of water through watersheds and to plants. He believes that computational simulation serves as a great platform for collaborative work to understand watershed function, and so uses watershed simulators across a variety of complexity levels in his work to interact with colleagues and stakeholders.
UNDERGRAD
Lee Smith
Lee Smith (she/her) is a third year at Northeastern University majoring in Environmental and Sustainability Science with a concentration in Earth, Oceans, and Environmental Change. Her Data Science minor allows her to focus on the application of data to sustainability.
For the past year, Lee has worked with an undergraduate team at Northeastern researching an environmentally safe way to degrade Endocrine Disrupting Compounds in groundwater. She hopes to apply this water quality background to one of the WRElab projects, where she is investigating wildfire-driven changes in landscape-scale infiltration and soil moisture using remotely-sensed estimates of soil moisture and precipitation.
PH.D.
Andrew Wanstall
Andrew is a PhD student in the WRElab in Northeastern University's Department of Marine and Environmental Science. Prior to joining the lab, Andrew completed his BS in Geology & Geophysics at Purdue University, where he conducted research on water resources in the Peruvian Andes as part of the Groundwater/Surface-Water Interactions Group. He also has two years of experience in environmental consulting, working as a hydrogeologist at Geosyntec Consultants.
Andrew's research interests center around combining computational modeling with field measurements to better understand recharge sources in watersheds and how they will change over time. He hopes this work will help better inform the public on issues such as sustainable water resource management.
Maya Weil-Cooley
Maya is a PhD student in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences as a member of the WRElab. She is interested in modeling erosion and landslide risks and assessing mitigation approaches, with the goal of developing land management solutions that address communities' complex environmental problems.
Maya holds a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from Hamilton College. Her previous research examined the impact of different agricultural practices on sediment export, nutrients, and carbon sequestration in the Mohawk River watershed of central New York. She also spent 6 months researching the benefits of different reforestation strategies on a catchment in New Zealand, a project that was presented to the local Māori land stewards. Maya is passionate about comprehensible scientific research that can advance the field and be useful for communities.