Our research follows water through the systems that carry it: down rivers and across floodplains, through pipes and treatment works, and into the ground beneath contaminated industrial sites. We model where it goes, what it carries, and how the infrastructure we build either protects people or fails them.

Water is the most direct physical link between the environment and human health, and the three failure modes are converging rather than staying politely separate. Climate change is intensifying both flooding and scarcity, sometimes in the same catchment in the same year. Ageing infrastructure leaks, surges and spills. A century and a half of industry has left a legacy of contaminated ground sitting above the aquifers people drink from. And water is not only a physical system: it is priced, regulated, traded and governed, and those decisions determine who bears the risk.

What holds our research together is a refusal to treat these as separate problems. The same catchment that floods is the one that runs dry; the same treatment works that cleans water consumes energy and produces sludge; the same ground that stores water stores contamination. We work across the whole of it, from the physics of a pressure surge in a pipe to the political economy of a water market.

Flooding and water risk

Mark Trigg, Professor of Water Risk, works on flood hazard at scales from the local to the global, combining hydrology, hydrodynamics, remote sensing and modelling. His research addresses a problem that matters enormously for the places least able to cope: existing global flood models disagree with each other, and understanding why is central to knowing how much to trust them. He is an Associate Director of water@leeds.

Duncan Borman develops computational fluid dynamics for free-surface and multiphase flows, including aerated flows over spillways and weirs, and the hydraulic structures that manage flood water.

Water infrastructure and hydraulics

Mohsen Besharat works on the physics of what happens inside water systems: two-phase transient flows, the pressure surges that damage pipelines, and the air valves and vessels designed to prevent them. His research also asks whether water infrastructure can do more than move water, developing compressed air energy storage in pipe systems and exploring how water networks can contribute to energy resilience rather than only consuming energy.

Contaminated land and groundwater

Our geoenvironmental research addresses the legacy beneath our feet. Doug Stewart works on metal and radionuclide contaminated groundwater, alkaline waste sites and redox-sensitive metals, including permeable reactive barriers for treating contaminated groundwater, and the mobility of toxic metals such as vanadium and chromium leaching from steel slag and bauxite residue. A recurring theme in his work is the role of soil micro-organisms in making contaminants more or less mobile.

Xiaohui Chen models coupled thermal, hydraulic, mechanical and chemical processes in the ground, from solute transport in fractured rock to carbon geological sequestration, increasingly using physics-informed machine learning. Shashank Subramanyam works on biogeotechnics, flow through porous media, and the bioremediation of contaminated ground.

Water quality and treatment

Maryam Asachi works on water and wastewater treatment technologies and water quality assessment, using multivariate statistics, spectroscopy and chemometric techniques to identify pollution sources and quantify how much each contributes to the quality of a water body. She also works on sustainable urban drainage systems.

Martin Tillotson, Chair in Water Management, works on water and wastewater treatment, sludge processing and resource recovery, connecting this theme to our bioresources research.

Water management, security and governance

Martin Tillotson is a Director of water@leeds and works on water resource management, water industry regulation and innovation, and virtual water: the water embedded in the goods we trade, which means a country can import or export water scarcity without moving a drop. Ruth Sylvester, Research Fellow in Water and Health Governance, works on water insecurity and water poverty, including in the UK, where roughly a fifth of households in England and Wales were affected by water poverty in 2020. Her research centres lived experience and the political processes that produce inequity, and connects this theme to our sanitation and WASH research.

Water is where the group's modelling strength is most visible. Xiaohui Chen develops physics-informed neural networks for unsaturated groundwater flow and interpretable machine learning to identify the drivers of groundwater change. Mohsen Besharat applies deep learning to predict air and water dynamics in pipe systems. Maryam Asachi brings chemometric and multivariate inference to treatment data. Duncan Borman develops CFD and particle methods for multiphase flow. Read more about our data-driven and computational methods.

This theme is closely tied to water@leeds, one of the largest interdisciplinary water research centres in any university in the world, which draws together over 500 academics and postgraduate researchers from across the University. Martin Tillotson is one of its Directors and Mark Trigg an Associate Director. Our researchers also contribute to the Leeds Institute for Fluid Dynamics and to Chen's Geomodelling and Artificial Intelligence Centre.

We supervise doctoral research across flood risk, hydraulics, groundwater and contaminated land, water quality and treatment, and water governance. We welcome students from engineering, mathematics, environmental and physical sciences, and the social sciences.

PhD opportunities · Meet the team

If you manage water, regulate it, or are dealing with the consequences of too much or too little of it, we would like to hear from you.

Contact the group