Earth Sciences Division Staff: Haruko Wainwright

Biographical Summary

My research focuses on hydrogeological/geophysical data assimilation and stochastic modeling of flow and transport. I started from modeling radionuclide transport for a hypothetical nuclear waste repository. Later I expanded my research into geostatistics and stochastic hydrogeology to include complex datasets and their uncertainty into prediction of existing/possible groundwater contamination. I am currently involved in subsurface characterization and flow-and-transport modeling related to three areas:

(1) Environmental remediation: Integration of datasets with various types (e.g. cores, hydraulic tests, borehole/crosshole/surface geophysical measurements) and scales (several inches to several hundred meters) for plume-scale flow-and-transport simulations, using Bayesian methods (as a part of Sustainable Systems Scientific Focus Area); Stochastic flow-and-transport simulations in high-performance computating environment (as a part ofAdvanced Simulation Capability for Environmental Management),

(2) CO₂ sequesteration: Uncertainty and sensitivity analaysis of CO₂ plume migration and pressure build-up (as a part of National Risk Assessment Partnership),

(3) Arctic hydrology: Subsurface characterization at the Arctic tundra site for characterizing permafrost dynamics and hydrology, using various datasets such as core/probe measurements and geophysical data (as a part of Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment-Arctic.)

Research Interests

• Geostatistics
• Hydrogeophysics
• Hydrogeological/geophysical data assimilation
• Stochastic inverse modeling
• Stochastic hydrogeology
• Environmental Remediation
• CO₂ storage
• Arctic hydrology

Education

• Dec. 2010: Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
• May 2010: M.A. in Statistics, University of California, Berkeley
• Dec. 2006: M.S. in Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
• Mar. 2003: B.Eng. in Engineering Physics, University of Kyoto, Japan

Professional Experience

• Feb. 2011 – Present: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, postdoctoral fellow
• Mar. 2004 – Aug. 2005: Argonne National Laboratory, visiting graduate student program
• Jan. 2004 – Mar. 2004: Argonne National Laboratory, Japan Atomic Energy Society international student exchange program
• Jul. 2003 – Aug. 2003: Japanese Atomic Energy Research Institute, graduate student traineeship
• Sep. 2002 – Oct. 2002: Schlumberger-Doll Research, summer internship

Awards

• TICOP young researcher travel grant award, 2012
• TICOP NSF travel grant award, 2012
• 2012 Director's Achievement Awards for Exceptional Tech Transfer Achievement (as a part of the TOUGH2 development team), 2012
• Student travel fellowship for the U.S. Department of Energy, Subsurface Biogeochemical Research 5^th Annual PI Meeting, 2010
• Student travel fellowship for the U.S. Department of Energy, Environmental Remediation Science Program 4^th Annual PI Meeting, 2009
• Roy G. Post Foundation Scholarship, 2009
• Jane-Lewis Fellowship, 2006-2007 and 2007-2008