Roberto Fernández, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State, will give the talk "Living with Water" at 2 p.m. on Sept. 25, in 117 Earth and Engineering Sciences Building on the University Park campus. The talk will also be available via Zoom.
The event is part of a fall seminar series hosted by TRAnscendIng Natural hazards forecasting (TRAIN). The talk is free and open to the public.
Ongoing environmental change has put water infrastructure to the test. From flash flooding across Central Pennsylvania to devastating floods in Nepal, communities across the world are under increasing pressure from challenges associated with water abundance, distribution and quality.
"In the face of aging infrastructure, population growth and shifting dynamics in Earth surface processes, we desperately need to develop smart water infrastructure and resilient systems to adapt to an evolving climate," Fernández said. "Recent disasters demonstrate that these extreme hydrologic challenges are both globally pervasive and acutely local."
Fernández will present previous and current research involving water infrastructure and argue that physical modeling is essential to enable successful mitigation and adaptation strategies to build resilient communities.
"We face tremendous challenges and have a key responsibility for future generations," Fernández said. "Therefore, we must identify, develop and implement context-appropriate solutions, harness technology to support our efforts, and prepare the next generation of professionals and scientists to work with communities as we continue living with water."
Fernández's research focuses on measurement technique development for water resources and geomorphology, and the role of erosive processes and how they shape the landscapes, including sediment transport, bedrock erosion and the formation and evolution of channels by melting and dissolution. His ongoing projects include studies on the fate and transport of microplastics, morphodynamics of meltwater meandering channels on ice, development of distributed acoustic sensing for streamflow measurements and machine learning-informed large scale image velocimetry techniques for discharge measurements.
He joined Penn State's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the fall of 2022. He is also a faculty member of the Institute of Energy and the Environment. Before joining Penn State, he was a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow at the Energy and Environment Institute at the University of Hull in the U.K. Fernández holds master of science and doctoral degrees in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
About TRAIN
TRAIN is an initiative through the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) that aims to transform complex geophysical and atmospheric data and bridge the gap between raw information and community resilience. TRAIN aims to build the community at Penn State to become nationally recognized for research innovation to respond proactively to funding opportunities and coordinate natural hazard responses.
