Environmental Transport Lab | Yang Research Group

Welcome to the Environmental Transport Lab (ET-Lab) led by Dr. Judy Yang. Our lab studies the transport of water, soil, chemicals, and bacteria in nature. We design flume, mesoscale, and microfluidic experiments to study complex fluid-particle-microbe interactions in natural environment. Our goal is to fundamentally understand and predict sediment transport and the associated landscape evolution, the transport of contaminants and carbon in soil, as well as bacterial spreading in soil and lung. Motivated doctoral students, undergraduates, and postdoc scholars are welcome to directly contact Judy (judyyang@umn.edu).

Research News

Oct 2022: Congrats Yuan for publishing a paper about "Corner flows induced by surfactant-producing bacteria Bacillus subtilis and Pseudomonas fluorescens" on Microbiology Spectrum.

June 2022: Congrats Shih-Hsun for publishing a paper about "Impacts of emergent vegetation on hyporheic exchange" on Geophysical Research Letters.

April 2022: We received a couple of awards and have openings for postdocs and graduate students, please feel free to contact judyyang@umn.edu

Sept 2021: Our paper about “Evidence for biosurfactant-induced flow in corners and bacterial spreading in unsaturated porous media” is published on PNAS.

Jan 2021: Our paper “4D imaging reveals mechanisms of clay carbon protection and release" is published in Nature Communications and highlighted Science Daily and other over 10 news outlets!

Our study was interviewed by The Counter.org and mentioned in Quanta Magazine.

May 2019: Our study on sediment transport was published in Geophysical Research Letters and highlighted in EOS Research Spotlight: "New Study Shifts Paradigm of Coastal Sediment Modeling"