Russ Detwiler

Prof. Detwiler joined UCI’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2008. He developed the Subsurface Processes Lab to pursue his interests in fluid flow and transport processes in porous and fractured media. He received his BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Vermont and PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Prior to joining UCI he worked as a staff scientist and Deputy Group Leader in the Experimental Geophysics Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Current researchers

Stephen Breen

Steve completed his PhD in Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley in 2020 and joined the SPL lab as a Postdoctoral Scholar in 2021. Prior to the PhD, he completed an M.S. in Civil Engineering (UCI), a B.S. in Physics (UCI), a B.A. in Economics (UCSC), and spent several years working in finance and engineering before dedicating himself to studying our environment. His research focuses on water-related science and engineering problems, such as the fate and transport of environmental contaminants, the security of geologic CO2 sequestration, and the relationships between groundwater and natural hazards. Progress in these areas requires basic research on the physics of flow through porous materials and computational approaches for constraining simplified earth models with limited data, two major challenges in hydrology and geophysics.

Esther Cookson

Esther received her B.S. in Physics at the University of California, Riverside. She is now a PhD student in the SPL and is interested in contaminant transport in the subsurface. She is currently researching trends and patterns of PFAS occurrence in wastewater – a potential source of groundwater contamination. Aside from research, Esther enjoys rock climbing, skateboarding, and being outside.

Nezahat Gülücük Barlas

Nezahat completed her BS and MS in the Department of Environmental Engineering at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She received a Fulbright PhD scholarship and joined UC Irvine in 2020 where she is a PhD student in the Subsurface Processes Lab. Her research interests include the potential sources of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in urban runoff.

Btissam Kadiri

Btissam is an MS student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She received her B.S in Applied Math at the University of California, Riverside. She joined the Subsurface Process Lab where she has interest in modeling the fate and transport of substances in groundwater. She enjoys walking by the beach with her three year old “Zayne”.

Zhen Liao

Zhen was a visiting scholar in the SPL from 2019-2020 and is working on his PhD at School of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering, Wuhan University, China. He completed his BS in Wuhan University in 2016. His research interests include multiphase / microfluidic / nonlinear flow behaviors, dissolution and transport processes in fracture and porous media. His email is zyliao@whu.edu.cn.