May 15, 2007

Shu-Guang Li, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been elected a fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the field of groundwater flow and contaminant transport modeling. “Dr. Li has been innovative in analyzing and modeling groundwater flow and contaminant transport. I am impressed by the tools he has developed,” comments Eileen Poeter, director of the International Groundwater Modeling Center, Colorado School of Mines. Li will be recognized at the GSA's October 2007 annual meeting in Denver.

Li and his MSU research team have been investigating new ways and new high resolution data sources to model flow and contaminant transport in complex groundwater systems, with the goal of: (1) significantly enhancing our ability to understand the effects of heterogeneity, scale interactions, uncertainty propagation, and interactions with surface water and (2) developing a new generation of integrated decision support tools for sustainable groundwater management. Li’s recent research includes IT-enabled, hierarchical modeling of complex groundwater systems; hierarchical inverse groundwater modeling; stochastic modeling of groundwater flow and contaminant transport; and integrated GIS-based modeling for multiscale groundwater management. He recently developed Interactive Ground Water (IGW), a nationally acclaimed software system for unified deterministic and stochastic groundwater modeling, as well as a state-of-the-art laboratory of excellence for real-time computing and multiscale modeling.

Li earned his PhD in water resources and environmental engineering in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the 2002 Premier Award from the NSF’s National Engineering Education Delivery System Organization, and his work on real-time interactive modeling was selected for the American Society for Engineering Education NSF Showcase in 2002. He has published extensively in leading hydrology journals in the general area of environmental hydrology and water resources, especially in groundwater modeling, contaminant transport modeling, and stochastic groundwater modeling. “His publications show a high level of original research in a very complex technical subject; he has also taken the next step by converting his theoretical work to models that can be used by the profession in practical applications,” says Darryll Pederson, professor of geosciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and former GSA Hydrogeology Section chair.

Li’s basic research has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation during the past decade. His applied research has been funded by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the Great Lakes Protection Fund, the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Geological Survey, local city governments, private industries, and citizen groups. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment (SERRA) and is an associate editor for the ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering and for the National Ground Water Association’s Journal of Ground Water. 

His software is making a significant impact on the groundwater community, especially in Michigan. His integration of modeling innovations, GIS, and Michigan’s statewide groundwater databases is, according to both Elgar Brown, Chief of Drinking Water and Environmental Health for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and Scott Ross, Chief of the state’s Source Water Protection Unit, “truly a ‘break-through-the-barriers’ kind of research,” which has led to a “technological leap forward” in the state’s ability to protect its groundwater resources. This methodology delineates scientifically valid wellhead protection areas without the need for extensive and expensive hydrogeological investigations on each site. The cost savings are significant, and IGW’s accuracy has been validated by a comparison to the results of hydrogeological studies. Li’s IGW program statistically filters out “noise” and seasonal variation, then calculates groundwater velocity using conductivity, estimated porosity, gradient, and reverse particle tracked groundwater to determine a ten-year time of travel for capture zones.

“His innovative research on nonstationary stochastic modeling and hierarchical patch dynamic modeling has significantly advanced our ability to simulate complex aquifer systems and process interactions across multiple spatial and temporal scales,” says You-Kuan Zhang, professor of geoscience at the University of Iowa and an expert in stochastic subsurface hydrology. More than 60 universities, including major research institutions such as MIT, UC Berkeley, UIUC, Columbia University, and UCLA use Li’s groundwater modeling software.