News

4/16/2024: Nacere Samassi successfully passed her qualifying exam and is now a PhD candidate! Woohoo!

2/26/2024: Another great article from Nautil.us about David Cúñez’s recent granular segregation paper!

2/9/2024: The University of Rochester wrote a lovely article about our recent paper- complete with an in-house photo of the brazil nut effect!

1/31/2024: Check out the first paper 100% homegrown in the DRIP lab!! We discovered that shape really matters in granular segregation, with wide implications for industrial and geophysical flows. David Cúñez did a wonderful job solving a challenging puzzle with undergrad Div Patel and Rachel Glade.

11/27/2023: Ever wonder how mountain top removal mining affects landscapes? Our collaborative paper spearheaded by Charlie Shobe is out in Geomorphology! It was fun to think about how cohesion and other materials affects landscapes with PhD Student Nacere Mohamed Samassi.

10/20/2023: JohnPaul Sleiman passed his qualifying exam and is now a PhD Candidate. Go JP!

10/16/2023: Rachel Glade is honored to have been selected as a 2023 Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering. The 5 year fellowship allows for funding and enhanced flexibility to conduct interdisciplinary research.

8/25/2023: We are very excited to start work on a new NSF grant in collaboration with Dustin Trail: “Prospecting for critical mineral deposits: an interdisciplinary approach using experimental geochemistry and field-informed modeling of sediment transport”

8/22/2023: David Cúñez and Rachel Glade attended the “Patterns in Granular Media” virtual workshop, Unicamp, Brazil.

8/14/2023: Div Patel attended the UROCKS Caving REU over the summer at James Madison University.

8/11/2023: JohnPaul Sleiman attended the Planetary Data Training Workshop at Arizona State.

7/31/2023: Nacere Samassi attended the Sediment Transport in Stream Assessment and Design Workshop at Utah State.

4/28/2023: Check out our preprint of the very first paper to come out of the DRIP Lab! “How particle shape affects granular segregation in industrial and natural flows”

12/16/2022: The DRIP lab presented tons of new work at the AGU Fall Meeting! Excellent presentations by undergrads Div Patel and Yisheng Zhong, grad students Nacere Samassi and JohnPaul Sleiman, and postdoc David Cúñez.

10/19/2022: PhD Students Nacere Mohamed Samassi and JohnPaul Sleiman presented their work in a formal setting for the first time at UR Grad Research Day. They both did a great job!

7/18/2022: We had a great outreach event with the Genesee Land Trust! Local high school students in the “Teens for the Earth” program came to the lab to do some hands on experiments and to learn about what it’s like to be a college or grad school student in a research lab.

5/20/2022: David Cúñez attended the CSDMS Spring School and presented work at the Annual Meeting

4/18/2022: Congratulations to undergrad Div Patel for winning a Discover Grant to conduct research in the DRIP Lab over the summer!

3/18/2022: We had a great time at our first APS March Meeting! So many excellent talks relevant for earth science!

1/7/2022: What an incredible workshop linking soft matter physics and geoscience communities! Thanks to everyone who participated in Physics in the Ground Beneath our Feet: Applications of statistical and nonlinear physics in environmental and geoscience.

12/15/2021: Check out David’s AGU poster about sediment shape effects on bedload transport!

12/14/2021: Check out Rachel’s AGU talk about solifluction lobes on Mars!

6/24/2021: We look forward to starting experimental work on our funded PRF New Investigator proposal, “The probabilistic physics of sediment diffusion in rivers.” Thank you to the American Chemical Society and the Petroleum Research Fund!

6/8/2021: Read about our latest work from the LANL news desk, also highlighted by the US Arctic Research Commission!

5/25/2021: Our paper about arctic soil patterns came out today in PNAS!

4/15/2021: Woohoo! This fall JohnPaul Sleiman and Nacere Samassi will join our group as PhD students, and David Cúñez will start a postdoc position!

1/22/2021: Ever wonder why cold landscapes look like they’re melting? Our latest work explains why! Recently submitted and available as a preprint at EarthArXiv.

12/24/2020: It was fun and sobering to think about the state of scientific progress in this revisiting of the classic 1963 allegory, The Brickyard. Check out our newly uploaded companion essays: The Brickyard in 2020, and The Young Brickmakers! We hope this can spark some much-needed discussion about how to address a challenging but pressing problem in all scientific disciplines.

11/30/2020: Why do Arctic soils produce such COOL patterns?! Find out in Rachel’s AGU talk, available here! She’ll be around to answer questions at 7am EST on Tuesday, December 8 in session EP010 – Granular and Fluid Physics in Geomorphology I

11/27/2020: How does one predict erosion over the next 10,000 years at a nuclear waste site? Find our in our recent paper!

6/15/2020: The Summer Physics Camp for Young Women was a huge success! For her small part, Rachel got to teach the students about fluid instabilities and local New Mexico geomorphology.

5/6/2020: Check out our virtual EGU display about solifluction and fluid patterns! Comments are welcome and open until May 31.

2/19/2020: We need to predict erosion at a hazardous waste site. How best can we do this with current, largely untested landscape evolution models? Find out in our hot-off-the-press trifecta of papers (1, 2, 3) in JGR Earth Surface!

6/11/2019: Check out this article about our recent paper on canyon evolution!

5/8/2019: How do river canyons evolve over time? What sets their shape and erosion rates? Check out our paper that just came out online in Geology!

4/17/2019: Rachel is honored to have received a Marinus Smith Teaching Award! Tons of thanks to her undergrad student, Estevan Munguia, for the nomination.

4/3/2019: Interested in landscape evolution modeling? Take a look at terrainbento, recently published in Geoscientific Model Development. 

2/13/2019: Judging the Boulder County High School Science Fair is always so much fun. These students are really impressive!

11/20/2018: Check out Rachel’s EPSP Young Researcher Spotlight to learn about hillslopes and giants!