Michael Cardiff joins the Department of Geoscience as an assistant professor after two years at Boise State University, where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher and assistant research professor. He is a hydrogeologist, meaning he studies the distribution and movement of groundwater and how contamination can move in aquifers. Cardiff completed his Master of Science and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford.
Welcome, Michael! Why are you most excited about being at UW-Madison?
The number of people who study water and water resources at UW-Madison is amazing, and I'm excited to look at water from a variety of different perspectives. From the Limnology program to Urban and Regional Planning to Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geoscience, there are a lot of great researchers who are passionate about water. I'm excited to strike up collaborations so that we can make progress on the major water quality and water quantity problems of the 21st century.
What are your research interests?
My research focuses on the use of different data sources to try to characterize fast and slow flow-paths for water that exist underground, so that we can make better predictions about where water and contaminants will flow.
What courses do you teach?
This fall I’m teaching a graduate-level course, GEOS724: Groundwater Flow modeling. In the spring, I'll co-teach our department's graduate-level inverse theory class, GEOS-793: Geophysical Inverse Problems, and I'll be offering a seminar through Geoscience on methods for describing and simulating geologic heterogeneity (methods for describing the structures we see underground).
What can students expect in the classroom?
Students can expect to get both a solid theoretical understanding of how water flows and the mathematics we use to model it, but also a good “applied” feel for the challenges and uncertainties that modelers and consultants face in the real world.
What’s the best thing you’ve done in Madison so far?
I’ve barely had a chance to move into my new house (my 11-month-old has seen to that), but I’ve had fun so far exploring the local “holy trinity” of beer, brats, and cheese.