Opportunities to work with me
Graduate Students
If you are a prospective student with an interest in the quantitative aspects of hydrology please feel free to contact me to discuss graduate research opportunities. However, I do receive a lot of general inquiries and am unable to respond to all. I will commonly refer inquiries to this web page. The purpose of this webpage is to give answers to general inquiry questions, so I can use my email responding time to focus on specific questions you may have. I apologize in advance for not responding in detail to general inquiries. If you have sent a specific inquiry and did not receive a response, please do follow up with a reminder as I do have trouble responding to all the email I get.
For general information on opportunities in Civil and Environmental Engineering, see https://engineering.usu.edu/cee/students/graduate/apply where there is information about applying to our program. You can learn about the department, Utah Water Research Lab and the research done by each faculty member and the various research centers starting at https://uwrl.usu.edu/ and https://engineering.usu.edu/cee/research/index. Depending on projects, many faculty will have openings for new graduate students and you should reach out to faculty whose interests align with yours. In your application you should include a statement of purpose giving ideas about the research area you plan to conduct studies in. These will then be part of the evaluation for admission and be used in matching you with an adviser. While not required by the department, GRE scores are an objective way to assess applicants from different universities and I encourage applicants to include these with applications.
In terms of considering to work with me, I receive many inquiries and selecting among applicants is quite competitive. If you are interested in working with me, please indicate in your application how your background aligns with the types of work that I do. This involves computer programming, numerical modeling and data and information systems and in evaluating student applications I look for specific ideas you have for research and specific information on your computer programming and modeling skills needed for working in my group. My research involves data intensive science that crosses the disciplinary boundaries between hydrology as an earth science, engineering and computer and information science so students who work with me should be interested in the application of evolving computational capabilities to the analysis and modeling of hydrologic data and processes to address water resources problems. If computer programming to develop or advance a new hydrologic model or hydrologic information system capability sounds exciting to you, then you’ll like my work; if not, then you probably should be talking to other professors.
Many students ask me if I think you have the credentials to be admitted. This is a question that is hard to answer as it is a decision of the admissions committee and no one can answer that question without seeing your application first. We are also unable to consider you for funding without evaluating a complete application.
Precise, logical writing is a critical part of research, and to succeed in research at USU you will need to be able to communicate and write effectively in English. I look for evidence of this in applications and in the emails that you write to me. I like to see examples (electronic copies) of any thesis (e.g. if you have a MS) papers or reports you have written that demonstrate research writing. Your personal statement is another place where we will see how well you can write. It should address the type of research you are interested in doing and how your background fits this interest.
Funding
We generally only admit students if there is funding to support their research. This is most often from sponsored research. If selected, you will be admitted and offered an assistantship to work on a specific project. Just so you aren’t surprised, we cannot make an absolute guarantee of multiple years of research funding. We are at the mercy of government funding agencies, who depend on year-to-year appropriations by a local, state, or national legislature. If you get a research assistantship offer, it will be for 1 year with subsequent years dependent both on your performance and the availability of funding. We do however have a good track record of providing ongoing funding to students performing well in the program.
We also welcome working with students who have their own funding (e.g. Fullbright or NSF graduate fellowship, or employer sponsored).
Post Doc's
I occasionally have funding for post-doctoral scholars. You should write to me well ahead of graduation if you are interested in working in my research group as a post-doc. As with graduate student inquiries please tell me how your research and interests align with my work as outlined in these web pages.
