Research
I am a scientist/engineer with a love for teaching, currently working as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Physical Geography at Stockholms Universitet with Fernando Jaramillo. I got my Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, where I worked with the U.S. Geological Survey on hydrodynamics and sediment transport in shallow bays and marshlands together with Mark Stacey and Jessie Lacy. I then did a one-year postdoc, also at Berkeley, in Laurel Larsen’s Environmental Systems Dynamics Group. My bachelors is in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.
My scholarship focuses on the following:
- environmental fluid mechanics and physical oceanography of wetlands, estuaries, and bays
- the transport and fate of matter in these environments: sediment, carbon, plastics, etc.
- how hydrodynamics are co-produced with geomorphic (and ecological) change
- novel techniques for observing and representing all of the above
These questions frequently intersect with infrastructure systems and concerns of human stewardship. I aim to think interdisciplinarily and humanistically!
I work primarily as a field scientist, trying to make effective use of environmental sensors and observations. To extend the application of these findings, I connect in-situ observations to larger spatiotemporal scales using remote sensing techniques and numerical models.
Outside of technical questions, I am energized by cultural theory and historical ecology around bodies of water and infrastructure. Increasingly, I am interested in institutional organization and how this impacts action towards habitat restoration. I collect and organize lots of information from my life at are.na/lukas-w.
(email me if you want anything!)
(photos by Nate Zack)