Leadership

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At the heart of our organization lies a commitment to effective leadership and collaboration. Our leaders embody our values, guiding our team with integrity, vision, and dedication. Each individual brings unique skills and experiences, enriching our collective journey towards shared goals. As we introduce our esteemed leaders, we invite you to explore their diverse expertise and passion to our community, driving innovation and excellence in all we do.

Lazaro Perez (Chair)

Lazaro J. Perez is an Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University (OSU). His research focuses on hydrological and geobiochemical aspects of subsurface porous material, specifically in quantifying how incomplete mixing of reactants affects chemical reactions and contaminant transport, and characterizing bacterial transport and biofilm dynamics and their impact on fluid mixing, from the pore scale to the field scale, using a combination of experiments and numerical modeling.

Lazaro earned his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain) in 2019, graduating with summa cum laude honors. Before joining OSU, he worked at the Desert Research Institute (Reno, NV), where he started as a postdoctoral associate in 2019 and was later promoted to Assistant Research Professor.

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Behzad Ghanbarian (Deputy Chair)

Behzad Ghanbarian is an Associate Professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of 125+ peer-reviewed journal articles, one book and edited two other books. His research interests center around a wide range of multidisciplinary topics, such as fluid flow and contaminant transport in heterogeneous porous media, resilience, tight reservoirs and upscaling techniques. He is a member of AGU, SSSA, and SPE and received the 2015 Donald L. Turcotte Award in nonlinear geophysics from the American Geophysical Union as well as the 2020 Soil Physics and Hydrology Division Early Career Award from the Soil Science Society of America. Behzad was also listed among the top 2% of scientists in the world in 2021, 2022 and 2023. He also received the TWISS Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award from Kansas State University in 2021 and 2022

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Veronica Morales (Former Chair)

VeronicaMorales

Verónica L. Morales joined the faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Davis in 2017 as an Assistant Professor. Her research focuses on the study of fate and transport in porous media, specifically on the physico-chemical processes of colloid/nanoparticle filtration, coupling between pore structure arrangement and flow heterogeneity, and upscaling pore-scale dynamics to better describe macroscopic transport phenomena. Veronica completed her graduate studies at Cornell University in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (MS, 2007) and Biological and Environmental Engineering (Ph.D, 2011). She then moved to Europe to complete her postdoctoral training as a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow at the SIMBIOS Centre, and later as an AXA Research Fund fellow at ETH Zürich.

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Emmanuel Cobbinah (Co-Director of Communications)

Emmanuel Cobbinah is a Ph.D. Student at the University of Nevada, and the Desert Research Institute, Reno. His research interests are focused on contaminant transport in the hydrological setting. Emmanuel is currently working on a USGS-funded project to study enteric virus surrogates in soil columns to characterize their transport behavior. He holds a bachelor's degree in Geological Engineering from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, and a master's degree from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Emmanuel was awarded the prestigious Nevada DRIVE Scholarship for the 2022/2023 academic year.

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Felix Ogunmokun (Co-Director of Communications)

Felix A. Ogunmokun is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on soil and water sciences, particularly the remediation of water-repellent soils, conservation practices for mitigating nitrate leaching to groundwater, and the assessment of winter flooding for boron leaching in almond orchards. Felix earned his PhD in Soil and Water Sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2022, where he studied the use of wetting agents to remediate soil rendered water repellent by effluent irrigation.

Felix currently serves as the Chair of the Postdoctoral Scholars Association at UC Davis and as Project Manager for a $10M USDA NIFA Sustainable Agricultural Systems project. He has received several awards and grants, including being named an Emerging Leader by the Soil and Water Conservation Society for 2024-2025 

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