Graduate students
Ann Scheliga is a 6th year PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Originally from Houston, Texas, Ann received her BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019. Ann currently focuses on surface water and groundwater interactions around human-constructed reservoirs using CYGNSS and GRACE satellite data. Ann received a NASA FINESST graduate fellowship in the summer 2023.
Read her full CV
Find her on Twitter: @annscheliga
Paul Seibert is a 4th 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 2nd year PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She attended UC Davis where she earned her BS 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.
Ashley Cao is a 2nd 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 2nd 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 first-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 1st 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
Visiting scholars
Quentin Euler is a MEng student from École Polytechnique in France, who spent the Spring and Summer 2025 in the lab, developing a new method to improve urban flood mapping using multispectral remote sensing. For his 4th and last year at Polytechnique, he will be an exchange student at the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace in Toulouse, France.