Bayani Cardenas

Associate Professor and William T. Stokes Centennial Teaching Fellow
Ph.D., New Mexico Inst. of Mining and Technol., 2006

Main Fields of Study:

Our research group addresses problems which range from fundamental to applied. My primary research interests are in understanding flow and transport phenomena in hydrogeologic systems mostly within the context of but not confined to surface water-groundwater interactions. We use a suite of tools including hydraulic testing/ aquifer characterization, hydrogeophysics, remote sensing, geostatistics, tracer testing, laboratory analog experiments, and computational modeling. In many ways, my research approach follows the famous quote below:

"All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers."

— James Clerk Maxwell from Faraday's Lines of Force (1856)

I hope you can work with our group at UT in 'reducing the problems of nature to operations with numbers'. One might think this approach mostly covers mathematical modeling of natural phenomena. In fact, one cannot 'operate with numbers' without quantitative observations. Our group's approach is therefore to integrate observations with models whatever form they may take.

Follow the link below to see who's who in our group.

Click on this link to visit our Research Group's website

Click on this link to view pictures from the field

To get an idea of the kinds of projects we recently completed, please view our publications list.

State-of-the-art resources are necessary for addressing important hydrologic questions. You can view some of our resources following the link below. Complementing these are equipment from other hydrogeology faculty and other research labs at the JSG.

Resources for research

Classes (Current and Future)

• GEO 346C: Introduction to Physical and Chemical Hydrogeology
• GEO 376S: Physical Hydrology
• GEO 376L: Field Methods in Groundwater Hydrology
• GEO 391: Surface Water-Ground Water Interactions
• GEO 382G: Fluid Dynamics for Earth Scientists (planned)

Collaborators or co-authors outside of UT (Past, Recent and Present)

• Aaron Packman, Northwestern University, USA
• Durelle Scott, Virginia Tech, USA
• Houshuo Jiang, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• John Wilson, New Mexico Tech, USA
• Jud Harvey, US Geological Survey, USA
• Mike Gooseff, Pennsylvania State University, USA
• Perran Cook, Monash University, Australia
• Peter Traykovski, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• Roy Haggerty, Oregon State University, USA
• Felix Janssen, Max-Planck Inst. for Marine Microbiology, Germany
• Vitaly Zlotnik, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
• Bethany Neilson, Utah State University, USA
• Christopher Neale, Utah State University, USA
• Fernando Siringan, University of the Philippines, Philippines
• Chuan-Chou 'River' Shen, National Taiwan University, China
• Ronnie Glud, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
• Isaac Santos, Southern Cross University, Australia
• Dirk Erler, Southern Cross University, Australia
• Anne Lightbody, University of New Hampshire, USA
• Andrew Guswa, Smith College, USA
• Fulvio Boano, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
• Michael Doering, Swiss Federal Inst. of Sci. and Technol., Switzerland
• Chris Robinson, Swiss Federal Inst. of Sci. and Technol., Switzerland
• Mahar Lagmay, University of the Philippines, Philippines
• Benjamin Andrews, Smithsonian Institution, USA