Graduate students
Paul Seibert is a 5th year PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Originally from Maryland, Paul received his BSc from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland in 2021. While completing his BSc, Paul spent a semester abroad at the Technical University of Denmark. Paul is currently working on understanding the effects of soil warming on vegetation water use, as well as measuring and modeling the solar-induced fluorescence signal of vegetation in response to variations in various environmental variables.
Read his full CV and visit his website
Find him on Google Scholar and Twitter: @paul__seibert
Anna Valcarcel is a 3rd year PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She attended UC Davis, earning her BSc in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering in 2021. She has had several research and extracurricular experiences working with small-format satellites and is now applying her knowledge to earth observation for environmental hydrology. Anna received an NSF GRFP Fellowship in Spring 2024 and is currently working on modeling the outflow of ungauged basins in the tropics using CYGNSS surface water maps and machine learning, as well as mapping salinity and freshwater plumes in oceans from PACE.
Find her on Google Scholar
Ashley Cao is a 3rd year PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Originally from Corona, California, Ashley received her BSE in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University in 2023. Ashley is currently studying the effects of dew deposition on vegetation at the ecosystem-scale using ecosys mathematical modeling.
Read her full CV
Katie Stephens is a 3rd year PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She holds a B.Sc. in Biological Systems Engineering from UC Davis (2020) and an M.Sc. in Material Sciences and Engineering from UC Merced (2023). She is currently working on using GNSS-R data from Spire to map the spatio-temporal variations of wetland extent in boreal ecosystems and the impact of these on methane emissions. Katie received a NASA FINESST graduate fellowship in summer 2024.
Read her full CV
Zeyin Li is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He earned his B.Sc. in Environmental Science from Hohai University in 2024. Zeyin has been collaborating with Paul and Ashley in the lab and is now beginning his independent research. His current work focuses on plant-water interactions and urban thermology, utilizing the Solweig model to investigate how variations in vegetation cover and building distribution jointly affect the urban heat island effect.
Hans Ivan is a 2nd year MSc student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. For his MSc thesis, he is studying flooding in the Sentarum Lake area using CYGNSS data and the impacts of inundation dynamics on conservation efforts.
Undergraduate students
Liv is a junior in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In the Water & Carbon Lab, Liv has been working on a global fog mapping project since Spring 2025, along with PhD student Paul Seibert.
Mahika is a sophomore in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In the Water & Carbon Lab, Mahika is working on a global fog mapping project along with PhD student Paul Seibert.
Visiting scholars