Research

Maintaining high water quality is very important to maintain healthy aquatic ecosystems. In order to preserve safe water resources and sustainable agriculture by reducing runoff-mediated contamination, best management practices (BMPs) for erosion, chemical and pathogen control need to be developed and implemented. My research group is focused on developing tools and techniques that can be used evaluate the effectiveness of various BMPs across a range of spatial scales specific to sediment, nutrient and pathogen transport. This will permit more informed and cost effective management decision making. Our research will also provide new insights into the pollutant fate and transport processes and the role of various forcing-functions on BMP performance at a range of scales. To gain these insights, we use both computation and experimental approaches. Along with conducting laboratory and field scale studies, our group also works on evaluating, modifying and developing simulation models for predicting water quantity at the laboratory, field and watershed scales considering the possible changes in climate and land-use.

Lab members:

Principal Investigator (PI): Rabin Bhattarai, PhD

332L AESB, 1304 W. Pennsylvania Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA
Telephone: (+1) 217-300-0001 (Office)
Email: rbhatta2 at illinois dot edu

Graduate student:

  • Manas Khan (PhD student)
  • Jacob Wood (PhD student)
  • Hongxu Zhou (PhD student)
  • Haribanshsa Timalsina (PhD student)
  • Youheng Fan (PhD student, co-supervised with Dr. Lei Tian, ABE, UIUC)
  • Wes Bollinger (MS student, co-supervised with Dr. Jeff Matthews, NRES, UIUC)

Other:

  • Soonho Hwang (Visiting Scholar/Postdoc)
  • Jason Kandume (Field/Lab technician)

Lab Alumni:

  • Sudip Gautam (MS, 2016)
  • Matt Stoklosa (MS, 2017)
  • Alex Goodwin (MS, 2018)
  • Rajesh Kandel (MS, 2018)
  • Ann Perry-Witmer (PhD, 2018)
  • Jacob Wood (MS, 2019)
  • Vaskar Dahal (PhD, 2019)
  • Chunhwa Jang (PhD, 2020)
  • Shailendra Singh (PhD, 2021)
  • Rishabh Gupta (PhD, 2022)
  • Daniel Kim (PhD, 2023)
  • Yufan Zhang (PhD, 2023)
  • Shiyang Li (Visiting scholar/postdoc, 2013-17)
  • Hongxu Zhou (Visiting scholar, 2017-18)
  • Hanseok Jeong (Postdoc, 2016-19)