Professor Josh West (USC)

Josh West is a Professor of Earth Sciences and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. He works at the intersection of Earth's landscapes, water & soil resources, and the carbon cycle & climate, focusing especially on mountains and their interaction with surrounding floodplains. His work addresses questions about how topography forms and evolves; how mountains control fluxes of water, sediment, and nutrients; how they interact with global biogeochemical cycles to regulate the long-term evolution of Earth’s life-sustaining environment; and how they contribute to generating natural hazards, particularly landslides and debris flows. His research also addresses the evolution of Earth’s environment in the past, and specifically how global climate has changed over  geologic time, even as it has remained stable enough to maintain a habitable planet. These interests intersect in understanding how erosion controls the exchanges of carbon between rocks, the biosphere, and the atmosphere, and how life has co-evolved with the carbon cycle.

https://earth.usc.edu/~joshwest/ 

Professor Marin Clark (University of Michigan)

Marin Clark, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan. Marin is a geologist with expertise in geomorphology, geodynamics, tectonics and geohazards. She has worked in central Asia on large field teams for several decades, beginning with NSF-supported work as an undergraduate assistant making maps that turned a “once in a lifetime” travel experience to Tibet into a career direction. She’s excited to work on big science questions about how plate tectonics and erosional systems shape mountains, while at the same time improving societal resilience to accelerating threats from geohazards. In this project, she contributes quantification of erosional processes from field and remote sensing data, characterization of near-surface rock and soil properties, and numerical modeling that couple landsliding processes to landscape evolution.

https://sites.google.com/umich.edu/marinkclark

Professor Dimitrios Zekkos (UC Berkeley)

Dimitrios Zekkos, Ph.D, P.E.,  is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. Dimitrios is a civil geotechnical engineer, with expertise on landslides, soil and rock mechanics, and geophysics.  He is passionate about multi-scale sensing and modeling approaches that help understand system-wide response in natural hazards and climate change. In this project he is contributing primarily in the geomechanical and  geophysical characterization as well as modeling of the Melamchi study area with the goal to better understand critical zone processes, landslide occurrence and the coupling of physical and geomechanical characteristics with geochemical processes.  

https://dimitrioszekkos.org/

Professor Deepak Chamlagain (Tribhuvan University)

Professor David Okaya (USC)

David Okaya is a Research Faculty member in the Dept. Earth Sciences at the Univ. Southern California.  David is a field seismologist who uses seismic imaging to characterize regions of tectonic and geologic interest.  His research interests include improving field and subsequent seismic signal processing methods to extract geologic information from controlled-source seismic profiling methods and more recently from earthquake and ambient noise data volumes.  David also carries out research on fundamentals of crustal seismic anisotropy with emphasis on tensor-based anisotropic rock properties plus numerical simulations of 3D seismic wave propagation in fully arbitrary anisotropic media.

https://earth.usc.edu/~okaya 

Professor Ed Tipper (Cambridge University)

My research interests concentrate on the links between the hydrosphere, atmosphere and lithosphere. How do chemical reactions at the Earth's surface mediate the chemistry of the atmosphere and seawater over geological time? How are these reactions influenced by rock composition and how do these reactions influence rock composition? To answer these geological questions I use geochemical methods, exploiting small variations in isotope ratios. Until the last decade it was not possible to measure these with sufficient precision to address geological questions that interest me. I have been involved in developing Mg and Ca isotope tracers as geochemical tools to investigate the important role of chemical weathering to geochemical budgets.  I am involved in a series of major fieldwork expeditions.  Some are our exploits can be followed on Twitter @UCam_RiverWATCH.

Professor Mike Bickle (Cambridge University)

Dr. Mike Bickle is an emeritus Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge. His research combines field based, petrological and geochemical research projects with physical modelling in order to understand better the important processes which control global evolution. Most of the research has been related to tectonic processes within the solid Earth but most recently he has been working on solid earth-hydrosphere-atmosphere interactions, especially chemical weathering in the Himalayas and its role in moderating long-term climate change.

Clement Desormeaux (Post Doc, University of Rennes/University of Michigan)

Clement Desormeaux is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Rennes (France). His research focus on the extreme tectonic and climatic events (earthquakes, landslides, floods) and their morphological effects on the Earth surface dynamic using a wide range of methods (e.g numerical modeling, high resolution topographical analyses). He is presently involved in the development and testing of a new numerical model to simulate deep-seated landslides and their consequences on long-term landscape evolution, notably in the Nepalese valleys.

Mohd Tarique (Post Doc, Cambridge University)

Mohd Tarique is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. His work focusses on use of traditional and non-traditional isotope geochemistry along with reactive-transport modelling to constrain the hydrological structure and fluid-mineral interactions in the weathered rock mass.

Parker Blunts (PhD candidate, UC Berkeley)

Parker Blunts is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the characterization of the physical and mechanical properties of rock mass within the Melamchi Valley. Characterization techniques include shallow geophysics primarily focused on frequency domain electromagnetic induction as well as geotechnical laboratory analysis such as ultrasonic velocity and strength testing. 

Sujata Bista (Ms student, Tribuvhan University)

Sujata Bista is a Master's/Graduate student at Tribhuvan University of Nepal working on geotechnical characterization of boreholes which is located along the ridges. She is using different geophysical techniques to examine the weathering variation with depth in bole hole and its impact on geotechnical parameters of Helambu Area in Central Nepal.

Chan Mao Chen (PhD student, USC)

Chan-Mao Chen is a PhD student at University of Southern California working on understanding the cause of the 2021 Melamchi flood and its geomorphic impacts on landscapes. He identifies the sources of sediment and quantified the volume of erosion and aggradation through remote sensing analysis and field observations, in the hope of facilitating the fluvial hazard mitigation among active mountain belts.. 

Sally Keating (PhD student, U Mich)

Sally Keating is a PhD student at the University of Michigan. She is interested in landsliding within tectonically active regions, both in their role in landscape evolution and the hazards they pose to surrounding communities. She is currently utilizing shallow geophysical field methods to examine how the critical zone changes across tectonic and climatic gradients. 

Shreya Ramesh (PhD student, USC)

Shreya Ramesh is a PhD student at the University of Southern California. She works at the intersection of hydrology and geochemistry, specifically using stable stream and rainwater isotopes to assess how water transits and reacts in several catchments throughout the valley. 

Anuj Siwakoti (Ms student, Tribuvhan University)

Anuj Siwakoti is a Master's/Graduate student at Tribhuvan University of Nepal working on characterization of weathering variation along the ridges. He is using geophysical and some field estimation techniques to examine the extent of weathering variation on different zones of Helambu Area in Central Nepal.

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Abra Atwood (PhD graduate, USC, 2023)

Abra Atwood completed her PhD student at the University of Southern California in 2023. She worked on understanding chemical weathering and critical zone architecture development across scales in the Melamchi Valley through a range of geochemical techniques including groundwater chemistry and transit times (using SF6, CFCs and 3H/3He), thin section analysis and XRF geochemistry in weathering pits and boreholes as well as soil production rates using 10Be cosmogenic nuclides. Abra is now a postdoc at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. 

Ries Plescher (Research Associate, University of Michigan)

Ries Plescher is a Research Associate at the University of Michigan studying the effectiveness of satellite rainfall data along the Melamchi valley and more widely across central Nepal. He is using data from rain gauges, including Nepali government gauges and new stations installed and maintained by the Nepal-FRES project, to scale satellite data and identify extreme rain events in order to better understand the influence of orography on storm intensity, duration, and frequency.

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Galen Kaip (UTEP Seismic Source Facility)

Bhairab Sitaula (Apex Adventure Trekking, Nepal)

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