Water Resources Engineering and Science Seminars

Abstract
Geosystems sustain the life and infrastructure above and host resources and wastes within. The proper engineering of geosystems is critical to addressing many societal sustainability challenges, such as groundwater withdrawal, geohazards under the changing climate, and earthquakes induced by subsurface energy technologies. In this talk, I will present a few topics within the broad context of experimenting, visualizing, and engineering of geosystems. I will start by presenting two innovations in geomechanics, photoporomechanics and interference optical projection tomography, which have overcome two outstanding challenges of measuring effective stress and 3D contact stresses, respectively. Through these innovations, I will present new insights we gain into sea ice transport, a large-scale floating granular system, and a new robotic sensor inspired by geosystems.

Bio
Wei Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Stony Brook University (SBU). He is also affiliated with the Department of Geoscience at SBU. Prior to joining SBU, he was a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Ruben Juanes’ research group at MIT (2019-2022). He obtained his Ph.D. degree at MIT in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Herbert H. Einstein. The overarching goal of Dr. Li’s research is to advance the engineering of geosystems in the context of climate change, infrastructure resilience, and energy- and water resources. Building upon his expertise in geomechanics, he extends the research portfolio of his Geosystems Laboratory at SBU towards several interdisciplinary and transformative research fields, such as critical mineral mining, tactile robotic sensing, tensor tomography, and beyond.