Samuel Munoz
Northeastern University, MA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
River floods cost the United States nearly $500 billion a year. These costs keep rising as more people live in flood-prone areas, sea levels rise, and rainstorms grow stronger.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
- Topics
river flooding
flood hazard assessment
flood risk
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Establish a long-term floodplain observatory, using environmental sensors and sediment cores, to monitor how floods deposit sediment along a lowland river.
- Run hydraulic models on modern and theoretical floodplain shapes, and combine them with field observations to link river flow to sedimentation patterns and produce precise paleoflood estimates.
- Measure the amount and types of microplastics in soils from different floodplain settings, using field sampling and geochemical analyses, to map where plastic is stored along rivers.
- Test how flood depth, flow speed, landscape setting, and plastic density and chemistry control microplastic buildup, and whether settling-velocity models designed for natural sediment also work for plastics.
- Work with community partners to evaluate how communities responded to recent river floods, combining local knowledge with Earth system observations and simulations of local flood drivers.
- Co-develop with residents a public decision-support tool that shows projected flood inundation under scenarios defined by the communities, to support municipal resilience planning.
More about the research
Yet flood hazard assessments still rely mostly on stream gauges, which record river flow over a few decades. They largely ignore the record that floods leave behind in sediment and the evidence of how rivers reshape their floodplains. This research uses floodplain sediments, hydraulic computer models, and local community knowledge to understand where floodwater and the material it carries end up. The goal is to improve how flood risk and river pollution are assessed and managed. Three projects connect this work: one reconstructs past floods from sediment layers, one traces where microplastics settle on floodplains, and one works with communities to plan for future floods.
Why it matters
Better flood hazard estimates could help floodplain towns, city planners, and river managers prepare for floods that are becoming more costly. The project gives municipal decision makers flood projections and a planning tool built with residents. Knowing where sediments, pollutants, and microplastics collect on floodplains could guide floodplain restoration and efforts to manage plastic pollution before it travels downstream to coasts and the ocean.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: Sedimentary signatures of large riverine floods to constrain risk and build resiliency
NSF · Sep 2023 – Aug 2028
RAISE: Working with communities to reduce flood risk and increase resilience
NSF · Jul 2025 – Jun 2028
CAS-MNP: Evaluating Patterns and Controls on Microplastic Accumulation in Floodplains
NSF · Sep 2022 – Feb 2027
Closest labs
Avantika Gori
Rice University, TX·Engineering
Develop a flood-risk framework based on performance-based design, which judges solutions by how well they meet stated goals, and apply it in two rural Texas communities.
Enrica Viparelli
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how sedimentation rates and grain sizes vary across the Congaree National Park floodplain after the Hurricane Helene flood, using field sediment sampling.
Kory Konsoer
Louisiana State University, LA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether the initial junction angle of a river meander cutoff controls how fast sediment plugs its entrance and whether an oxbow lake forms, using recent cutoffs on the West Fork White River, Indiana.
The school
Northeastern University: 27 labs on PI Pages, $347M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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