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Welcome to the Environmental Flow Computing (EFC) Lab!

We are a team of modelers, scientists, and engineering researchers dedicated to studying above- and belowground water flow and transport phenomena across watersheds, rivers, wetlands, and coastal areas.
We invite you to explore our web pages and reach out if you are interested in collaborating or have any questions.

News

WISER annual meeting group photo
WISER Annual Meeting (U Albany, Feb 2026)
Li presenting at AGU25
PI Li presenting Tire Wear Particle transport modeling work at AGU25 (New Orleans, Dec 2025)
CTDOT-UConn meeting
CTDOT-UConn ideas exchange meeting (UConn, Sept 2025)
  • [Jul 2026] Our UConn-PNNL team is honored to have been selected for a project in the DOE Genesis Mission as part of the first cohort advancing AI-enabled sciences. More details on:
  • [Jun 2026] AGU26 session approved. Together with scientists from USU, PNNL, UT Austin, WSU, CUAHSI, and Princeton, we will host twin hydrologic modeling sessions, H013-Advances in Integrated Hydrologic Modeling: Applications Across Complex Systems, and H014-Advances in Integrated Hydrological Modeling: Methods, Solvers, and Computational Innovation. Look forward to meeting you at AGU26!
  • [May 2026] PI Li delivered a presentation titled “ATS Model Data Archive Format” in the “AI-Ready Data Formats” session at the DOE BER-hosted Joint Cyberinfrastructure Working Groups and ESS-DIVE Annual Meeting 2026.
  • [Dec 2025] PI Li presented at AGU25 and successfully chaired the hydrologic modeling session. Look forward to AGU26.
  • [Dec 2025] This round of PhD student recruitment has concluded. We received more than 60 inquiries from prospective students worldwide. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR INTEREST IN JOINING US.
  • [Sep 2025] We are hiring! A Graduate Research Assistant (PhD student) position will be available starting in Fall 2026. If you are interested, please contact us for more information.
  • [Aug 2025] Our lab is now open! We are ready to conduct high-quality research on a wide range of water-related topics.
Older news
  • [Jun 2025] AGU25 session approved! Together with scientists from PNNL, USU, and Princeton, we will host a hydrology session, Advancements in Physics-based, Integrated Hydrologic Modeling to Support Water Resources Management. Look forward to meeting you at AGU25!
  • [Apr 2025] It’s official! I will join the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut as an Assistant Professor in the Fall 2025 semester!
  • [Feb 2025] I gladly welcome collaboration on any interesting development and application of pyRiverBed! A co-authored paper titled “Analytical simulation of meander morphology from equilibrium to long-term evolution: Impacts of channel geometry and vegetation-induced coarsening” has been published in International Journal of Sediment Research. doi: 10.1016/j.ijsrc.2025.02.003

UConn Links

Lab PI: Zhi Li, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Affiliated with the Eversource Energy Center

Lab Keywords: Computational Hydrology & Hydraulics, Watershed Hydrology, Disturbance Hydrology, Solute Transport, Reactive Transport, Environmental Fluid Mechanics, Turbulence in Open-Channel Flows, Sediment Transport, River Dynamics, Fluvial Geomorphology, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), High-Performance Computing (HPC), Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN)

Contact: zhi.2.li@uconn.edu

GitHub:

EFC Lab and PI personal

Lab Sponsors:

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