Dr. Greg Lawrence

Dr. Greg Lawrence has been a faculty member at UBC since 1987.  Focusing on the impact of the fluid mechanics of inland and coastal waters on water quality, chemistry and biology, Dr. Lawrence is investigating techniques to minimize the environmental impact of waste discharge; restoring and rehabilitating lakes and other water systems that have been polluted.  Dr. Lawrence was elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 2011 and the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering in 2012, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Camille Dagenais Award for his contributions to the development and practice of hydrotechnical engineering in Canada (2011), the BC Premier’s Award (2010), and the Journal of Environmental Engineering Editor’s Award (2001). Dr. Lawrence is also an instructor in the UBC Master of Engineering Leadership in Integrated Water Management.

Dr. Bernard Laval

Dr. Bernard Laval joined the Department of Civil Engineering in June 2002, and currently serves as the Department Head. Additionally, Dr. Laval served as the Associate Head for the Undergraduate Program from 2012-2015 and 2016-2017. His background in Engineering Physics (University of British Columbia) provides him with a very versatile technological base. He has a Masters in Physical Oceanography (McGill University) and a PhD in Environmental Engineering (University of Western Australia). From 1995-1998 Bernard worked as a research scientist developing Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (submersibles) for use as instrument platforms for the study of lakes and coastal waters. Dr. Laval has over 20 years of experience in applied fluid mechanics of inland and coastal waters and has authored several publications on field instrument and numerical model development, as well as description and theory of transport processes in lakes and estuaries.

Dr. Nimish Pujara

Dr. Nimish Pujara joined the Department of Civil Engineering at UBC in 2025. He obtained his undergraduate and masters degrees in Engineering at the University of Cambridge, his doctorate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, and he held a postdoctoral research and teaching position in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Before joining UBC, he was a faculty member in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Dr. Pujara’s expertise is in fluid mechanics and its applications to environmental, geophysical, and coastal phenomena.

Dr. Roger Pieters

Dr. Roger Pieters is a Research Associate in the department Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences.  The focus of my research has been on physical limnology – the physics of lakes, reservoirs, and water filled mine-pits.  I have conducted field projects, and have participated in a variety of multidisciplinary studies involving researchers from a range of backgrounds.  Examples of recent projects include examining how thermal stratification isolates turbidity in a drinking water reservoir, how interflow short-circuits nutrients to the deep outlets of an hydroelectric reservoir, and how the exclusion of salt from the ice can induce meromixis (permanent stratification) in brackish pit-lakes.

Email: rpieters@eoas.ubc.ca

Dr. Ted Tedford

Dr. Ted Tedford started studying circulation and mixing in coastal and inland waters as a masters student in 1998. His focus and strength is in the combined use of spectral analysis, analytical theory, laboratory models and numerical models to interpret field observations. His long term goal is to better understand the impact of small scale processes particularly shear instabilities, internal waves, convection and surface waves on large scale circulation in lakes and estuaries.

Email: ttedford@eoas.ubc.ca

Brody Granger (M. Sc.)

In an early memory, Brody is watching waves while sitting in a little boat with his mother on Rose Lake, a small lake near his hometown of Williams Lake, BC. She tells him that some people dedicate their lives to understanding waves, which he finds shocking. He somehow managed to overcome his shock, grew up, and went to UBC to study engineering, where at the 2013 Civil Christmas Party he got chatting with Bernard Laval who offered Brody a summer job in his research group. Brody accepted, and the two shook hands. On the fourth of August of that following summer, in the region where Brody grew up, Mount Polley Mine spilled its guts into Quesnel Lake, a disaster which years later would become the subject of his M.A.Sc. thesis with Bernard. Brody attempted to leave the research group by fleeing to the other side of the world but was pulled back in, slowly at first, then rapidly once his visas expired.

Email: grangerb@mail.ubc.ca

Sherif Alaa Ibrahim (M. Sc.)

I am a water resources engineer, Assistant Lecturer (on leave) at Cairo University, and Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Fluid Mechanics, with experience spanning research, engineering consultancy, and university teaching and capacity building. My work integrates field observations, data analysis, numerical modeling, and engineering design across lakes, rivers, groundwater, and urban water systems, from local to regional scales, including work on shaping water policy. I earned my Bachelor’s (2019) and Master’s degrees (2023) from Cairo University, where my graduate research investigated antibiotic-resistant bacteria in wastewater and irrigation systems. I am currently pursuing my Ph.D. under Dr. Laval, developing new conceptualizations and frameworks for understanding the world’s deepest lakes. My anchor study site is Quesnel Lake, of great importance to the Secwépemc First Nations, where I examine deep mixing and ventilation and how climate change may alter these processes. This work integrates field observations, numerical hydrodynamic modeling, simple machine learning, and data analysis. I am inspired by a desire to address pressing water challenges that affect both my country and the global context.

Email: sherif.ibrahim@ubc.ca

Sara Jamali (M. Sc.)

Sara earned her Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2021, where her undergraduate research focused on investigating the effects of climate change on thermal stratification and water quality in lakes, with a case study of Lake Michigan. Currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Environmental Fluid Mechanics under the supervision of Dr. Lawrence. Sara’s research focuses on assessing the impact of salt exclusion during ice formation on spring turnover in a brackish pit lake using the General Lake Model (GLM).

Email: ssaraj@mail.ubc.ca

Akash Kav (M. Sc.)

Akash is a PhD student co-supervised by Dr. Greg Lawrence and Dr. Neil Balmforth from the Department of Mathematics. He studied physics for his BSc (2023) at the University of Alberta, where he studied a variety of physics topics, including condensed matter physics, cosmology and fluid dynamics (specifically, triad resonant instability). He studied the generation of internal waves from turbulent, stratified shear flow for his MSc (2025) at the University of Alberta. Now, his PhD work focuses on the hydrodynamic analogue of the Hawking process, where a black hole can evaporate due quantum effects around the event horizon.

Email: akav01@math.ubc.ca

Amin Sadeghpour (M.Sc. , Graduation 2026)

I earned my MASc degree at UBC as a member of the EFM Group under the supervision of Dr. Laval. My master’s research focused on summertime upwelling in Quesnel Lake, BC, and how cold, upwelled lake water influences downstream river temperature. Through field observations and simplified modelling, I investigated the roles of wind speed, direction, duration, topographic channeling, lake morphology, and selective withdrawal in driving downstream river cooling events. If you are interested, my thesis is available here: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0453316 . I am currently a Research Assistant working with Dr. Lawrence, where I study the characteristics and dynamics of meromictic lakes and explore the potential of engineering meromixis for mine-closure applications.

Talia Houston

Talia earned her Bachelor’s Degree in 2024 from the University of British Columbia. Her undergraduate research was centered on methane dynamics in two upland lakes in Kelowna. Talia is now a Master’s student working under the supervision of Dr. Gregory Lawrence. Her current research focuses on Base Mine Lake. Talia’s passion lies in exploring complex freshwater ecosystems and contributing to sustainable water resource management.

Email: thoust01@student.ubc.ca

Romane Bouchard

Romane is a Master’s student working under the supervision of Dr. Bernard Laval. Her research focuses on understanding the physical dynamics of Sx̱ótsaqel (Chilliwack Lake) under the impacts of Climate Change. She is particularly interested in how physics governs the microscopic scale of a system, and how understanding these dynamics can improve mitigation and conservation strategies in the face of climate change. Romane graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor’s Degree in the joint major of Physics and Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from McGill University.

Email: romaneb@mail.ubc.ca

Sophie Gravelle

Sophie completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Bioresource Engineering, with a focus in environmental engineering, at McGill University in 2025. Throughout her undergraduate studies, she developed an interest in evaluating the impacts of human actions and climate change on aquatic ecosystems. Sophie is now pursuing a Master’s degree in Environmental Fluid Mechanics under the supervision of Dr. Laval. Her graduate research focuses on understanding the physical dynamics of Sx̱ótsaqel (Chilliwack Lake) under the impacts of climate change, combining her multi-disciplinary engineering background with a passion for sustainable water resource management.

Email: sgravell@student.ubc.ca

Ana Erdevicki

Ana is a fourth-year undergraduate student who moved from Geological Engineering to Civil Engineering in 2025. A fluid mechanics course taught by Dr. Greg Lawrence and Sherif Alaa Ibrahim sparked her interest in limnology, leading her to join the EFM Group to study Quesnel Lake under the supervision of Dr. Bernard Laval and Sherif. Ana’s research has involved GIS, detecting lake ice in satellite imagery, data filtering, modelling, and scientific communication. Recently, she worked with Sherif on a Gaussian process model of deepwater cooling in Quesnel Lake. She has presented her work to limnologists, First Nations community members, and Quesnel Lake residents, and has taken part in a field visit to Deeks Lake. Ana received a scholarship to attend and help organize the PPNW 2026 conference in Croatia, where she presented her research. Their work has also been submitted for presentation at AGU 2026 in San Fransisco. Beyond limnology, she has experience in steel bridge design and structural engineering consultancy.

Owen Mecklem

Owen received a Bachelor’s in Physics from Willamette University with a minor in Environmental Science. He is now a graduate student in Civil Engineering working under the supervision of Dr. Nimish Pujara. Owen’s research focuses on developing a field deployable single-camera particle imager to characterize bedload sediment flux. He is interested in understanding sediment fluxes in ocean environments to better protect our coastlines against erosion. 

Alumni

Dr Kelsey Everard (Ph.D., Graduation 2023)

Dr. Kelsey Everard completed her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Greg Lawrence and Dr. Marc Parlange in November 2023. She was also a member of the UBC Institute of Applied Mathematics. Her dissertation addressed three topical problems in natural convection: 1) how to interpret observational turbulence measurements in thermally driven flows, 2) how a strongly temperature dependent viscosity affects the dynamics of free convection, and 3) how exchange flows driven by differential cooling interacts with the non-linear equation of state to impact the timing of ice-onset in a lake. She now works as a postdoctoral research associate in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU. Her current work involves using machine learning techniques to improve the parameterisation of mesoscale eddies in ocean models. She is broadly interested in environmental and geophysical fluid dynamics, with particular interest in dynamics involving density gradients under the influence of gravity and boundary-layer processes.

Email: kae10022@nyu.edu

Lauren Ing (M.Sc., Graduation 2024)

Lauren completed her Master of Applied Science in November 2024 under the supervision of Dr. Greg Lawrence, working closely with Dr. Ted Tedford. Her research focused on quantifying methane ebullition flux at Base Mine Lake using bubble traps and analyzing its relationship to hydrostatic pressure (https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0445540). She previously earned a Bachelor’s of Engineering Science in Civil Engineering with an Environmental Specialization from the University of Western Ontario in 2022, where her undergraduate research explored improving geophysical methods for assessing stormwater infiltration at low-impact development sites. Lauren is currently based in Toronto, pursuing opportunities in the water resources engineering industry.

Dr. Jérémie Bonneau (Ph.D., Graduation 2025)

I am a professor in the Department of Civil and Water Engineering at Université Laval, Québec City. I completed my PhD and PostDoc with Dr. Bernard Laval (UBC) and Dr. Derek Mueller (Carleton University). My research focuses on ice-ocean interactions in glacial fjords and ice shelf cavities. More specifically, I study how the ocean circulation is influenced by coastal ice structures (tidewater glaciers, ice shelves) and in return how the fate of these ice structures is linked to the ocean circulation. I combine in-situ oceanographic observations and three-dimensional numerical modeling to answer these questions. My main field site is Milne Fiord, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island, where I have the chance to visit each summer. More broadly, I am interested in environmental and geophysical fluid dynamics, the impact of climate change on the cryosphere, and interactions between ice and water.

Email: jeremie_bonneau@outlook.com