William Johnson
University of Utah, UT·Earth & Environmental Science
Microplastics, pathogens, and other tiny particles are turning up more and more in groundwater, which threatens drinking water and ecosystems. Predicting where these particles travel underground is hard.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
- Topics
colloid transport
particle transport
porous media
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Quantify how particles such as microplastics and pathogens attach to sediment grains after repeated encounters, using laboratory transport experiments in porous media combined with surface characterization.
- Determine how nanoscale surface features and nanoscale attraction on grain surfaces control whether particles stick or keep moving through soil and groundwater.
- Develop a predictive transport framework that includes nanoscale attraction and each particle's interception history, using theory, simulations, and machine learning to predict retention and mobility across scales.
More about the research
Current models do not capture how particles actually behave in natural soils. They miss how particles stick to sediment grains, or fail to stick, after meeting them.
Why it matters
Better predictions of how microplastics, pathogens, and other contaminant particles spread underground could help water managers protect drinking water supplies. They could also help design more effective groundwater cleanup. Communities that rely on groundwater would benefit.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Veronica Morales
University of California-Davis, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether coupling between water flow and bacterial biofilm growth in sediment pores controls where and when oxygen-free microzones form and how reactants reach them.
Nicholas Engdahl
Washington State University, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop a Madelung-style amplitude–phase groundwater transport model in which amplitudes describe probable transport modes across sediment types (facies) and phases act as velocity potentials, recovering the classical advection–dispersion equation in limiting cases.
Bhuvnesh Bharti
Louisiana State University, LA·Engineering·Early-career
Use large-scale simulations of coupled magnetic, hydrodynamic and contact interactions, plus analytical theory, to derive design rules for how micron-scale magnetic colloids aggregate and move cooperatively in porous media and open three-dimensional fluids.
The school
University of Utah: 58 labs on PI Pages, $789M a year on research, 366 research doctorates a year.
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