Post-doctoral Scholar
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
yxu294@ucsc.edu
Research interests: Hydrologic modeling, ecosystem modeling, reactive transport, stormwater management
Biography
I obtained my B.S. in Hydrology and Water Resources from the Hohai University in Nanjing, China and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Pittsburgh, USA. My Ph.D. thesis was on the hydro-thermal-geochemical modeling in a waste coal area. After graduating, I joined Tetra Tech Inc as an Environmental Engineer in Virginia and developed/co-developed several tools of Stormwater Management for EPA projects. Because I did not win the H-1B visa lottery, I moved back to China and worked as a Research Fellow in the Nanjing Normal University. In that period, I got an opportunity to visit the Earth System Analysis & Model Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as a Research Scholar(visiting postdoc) to make some contributions to the development of The Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES). After visiting, I returned back to the university. Then I was thinking to start a new journey of smart water and worked in a few industrial companies as a Senior Water Resources Engineer. However, I never give up the dream to become a scientist. Therefore, I currently participate in the Institute of Marine Science at the University of California Santa Cruz as a Postdoctoral Scholar, which is on the way to my dream.
Research
My research mainly focus on the fields of hydrologic modeling, ecosystem modeling, reactive transport and stormwater management. The goal of my research is to provide scientific results by developing or applying numerical modeling approach in high- performance computer (HPC) to investigate the dynamic processes in hydrology, ecology and geochemistry. My current postdoc research is to use established models to study howdifferent coastal wetland restoration options and climate change will affect wetland hydrology and carbon balance. It will be a decision basis for policy makers about the practices on coastal wetland restoration.