PhD Students

Asal’s research interest is focused on urban hydrology. She joined the PIRE program in 2012 and currently working in professor Stanley Grant lab. She started her PhD studies with understanding the impact of urbanization on stormwater runoff hydrograph and how Low Impact Development (LID) implementation could return the impaired hydrology to the more natural condition. To this end, she developed a statistical change detection framework to quantify the deviation of post-urbanization stormwater runoff hydrograph. This work inspired her for writing a review paper on how using LID could address the symptoms of urban stream syndrome, which got published in Environmental Science and Technology journal in 2015. Currently, she is working on management of nitrogen export out of urbanized and agricultural watersheds, which is one of the remarkable symptoms of urban stream syndrome.

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I am interested in developing models for hyporheic exchange that can assist in the restoration of urban streams, and the design of natural treatment systems such as wetlands and biofilters. This project will link together mass transport theory (Professor Stanley Grant, UCI), direct numerical simulations of turbulent and particle-laden boundary layer flows (Professor Said Elghobashi, UCI), and experimental measurements of hyporheic exchange in laboratory flumes (Professor Mike Stewardson and Australian Research Council Fellow and Professor Ivan Marusic, University of Melbourne).

<img src="http://water-pire.uci.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/06_13_2013_us-flag-e1423775508460.gif" alt="06_13_2013_us-flag" width="379" height="200" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4234" />