About
Hal is a Senior Research Fellow in Statistical Analysis and Modelling with the WorldPop research group within the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton. His research interests are broadly in hydrology, sediment and constituent transport processes, and more specifically, their impact on human population, migration, livelihoods, and socioeconomics. Hal brings his background and experience in engineering, statistics and applied mathematics to stochastic and deterministic model development. His career spans a wide range of research activity in atmospheric, hydrologic, geographic, and engineering sciences.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Hydrological and sediment processes in watersheds and rivers
- Contaminant transport throughout hydrologic systems
- Water and sediment impact on human development
- Climate change impacts on human development and mobility
Publications
Teaching
Teaching Experience
Hal has teaching experience lecturing two years of undergraduate courses in mathematics and statistics at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and Northern Arizona University in 2002 – 2004, and lecturing one semester of a graduate course in Small Watershed Hydrology in the Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno in the spring of 2014.
Other Educational Activities
Hal was a volunteer Event Supervisor for the Dynamic Planet section of the Nevada State Science Olympiad in 2012 and 2013. Hal volunteered for first year undergraduate Tutorial Supervisions of at the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton in Spring 2016. Hal developed and taught a one-day workshop on System Dynamics Modelling for Sustainability for engineering undergraduate students at the Southern Institute of Water Resources Research, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam in 2018, and then later taught the same workshop to the GeoData group at the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton.
Biography
Hal earned a BSE in Environmental Engineering and a BS in Applied Mathematics from Northern Arizona University in 2001 before earning a MS in Statistics with Distinction from Northern Arizona University in 2004. He worked in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences (DAS) at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada as an Air Quality Data Analyst performing statistical analysis and developing models on multiple projects under contract with local, national, and international government agencies.
Hal worked in the Division of Hydrologic Sciences (DHS) at the Desert Research Institute as a Graduate Research Assistant while working towards his doctoral degree, earning a PhD in Hydrology from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2013. During his tenure at the DHS, Hal worked on a variety of projects in areas of groundwater contaminant transport, snowpack hydrology, ecohydrology, groundwater thermal convection, and sediment transport. Hal was a statistical consultant on several projects assisting DRI colleagues with modelling, sampling and experimental designs.
Hal received a postdoctoral position in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton in 2014, where he worked in collaboration with the μ-VIS X-Ray Imaging Centre to develop a 3D vector-based sediment entrainment model from X-ray scanned images of extracted samples of river sediment beds. Hal’s work on rice agriculture sustainability by led to developing a spatially-explicit system dynamics model (SDM) of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta upon which subsequent components were added to the SDM to study the effects of hydrologic extremes of floods and droughts throughout the Mekong River Basin. This model was developed with contributions from Vietnamese stakeholder and policy makers. Hal currently works with the WorldPop modelling group to develop Bayesian statistical models for human mobility and population estimates.