Dr Tristan Rees-White BSc Hons, MSc, PhD, FGS

Research Fellow

Dr Tristan Rees-White is a Research Fellow within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.

Tristan Rees-White was awarded a PhD from the University of Southampton through his research into landfill dewatering systems in 2007. Prior to this, after completing a Master’s degree in Geology at the University of Wales Cardiff, he was employed as an engineer for Veolia Environmental Services Ltd, overseeing the construction and maintenance of leachate management systems.

His research at the University of Southampton has focused on techniques to reduce the contaminant load from legacy landfill sites and, more recently, the measurement and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from landfill.

Tristan worked as a full-time researcher within the EPSRC-funded ‘Science and Strategies for the long-term management and remediation of landfills’ project, and the current EPSRC  ‘Quantifying macroscopic flow and transport in the unsaturated zone to address the long-term contaminant burden of waste repositories’ project. He has designed and carried out large-scale experiments and tracer tests at the laboratory and field scale, at sites across the UK and in Europe, investigating the effectiveness of contaminant removal through flushing.

His current research also includes the development of fugitive methane gas emission monitoring in the UK using the tracer dispersion method. He has carried out more than 30 whole-site emissions measurements at operational and historic landfill sites for the Environment Agency, defra and the Woodland Trust.

Other research areas have included those into the aerobic treatment of wastes and landfill gas augmentation.

He is a member of the University of Southampton’s Waste Management Research Group and a Fellow of the Geological Society.

BSc (Hons), Cheltenham College of Higher Education, 1997

MSc, University of Wales, Cardiff, 2000

PhD, University of Southampton, 2007