J. Alberto Casillas-Trasviña

J. Alberto Casillas-Trasviña is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCLA and an Affiliate Faculty member of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. His research focuses on groundwater resilience in arid and drought-prone regions, integrating process-based hydrological modeling, environmental and age tracers, and machine learning to improve recharge estimation, solute transport, and managed aquifer recharge. Alberto and his group at the UCLA Groundwater Hydrology Lab apply these methods to water management challenges in California’s Central Valley, including conjunctive use and compliance under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, and to understanding how wildfires and other environmental disturbances alter aquifer recharge dynamics in semi-arid systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Geology from Ghent University (2022), an M.Sc. in Hydrology and Water Resources from UNESCO-IHE (2018), and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de La Paz (2014).

Research & Interests

Groundwater hydrology; Vadose zone hydrology; isotope and age tracer methods; coupled surface water-groundwater modeling; managed aquifer recharge; wildfire impacts on groundwater recharge; Bayesian uncertainty quantification; machine learning for hydrogeology; aquifer characterization.

Education

Ph.D. (2022), Universiteit Gent, Belgium

M.S. (2018), UNESCO-IHE, Delft, The Netherlands

B.S. (2014), Instituto Tecnológico de La Paz, B.C.S., México