Adnan Rajib
University of Texas at Arlington, TX·Earth & Environmental Science
Floods, wildfires and habitat loss are putting coastal and urban communities at growing risk. Managing water and land under these pressures requires both new field data and new tools.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
hydrology
coastal resilience
living shoreline
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Evaluate the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the Living Engineered Reef System on the Texas Gulf Coast through a pilot study, techno-economic assessment (weighing performance against cost), and community co-design workshops.
- Develop technical guidelines for designing reef structures that reduce coastal flooding, regrow oyster habitat and store carbon, drawing on additive manufacturing, AI and remote sensing.
- Measure post-fire turbidity (water cloudiness from sediment) in Los Angeles streams near burned, debris-prone areas, with a 3-month baseline campaign followed by 9 months across dry and wet conditions.
- Estimate char cover and soil burn severity across the 2025 LA fire region from high-resolution real-time satellite images, then use an AI model to find what controls turbidity peaks and recovery during fire-flood sequences.
- Build a three-level open training curriculum, from foundation to expert to developer, in big data, simulation and high-performance computing for climate, water and environmental sustainability, following FAIR data principles.
More about the research
The projects here pair water science with remote sensing (satellite observation), artificial intelligence and open data. They address two settings: Texas Gulf Coast shorelines and Los Angeles watersheds after the 2025 wildfires. A third project trains students to use these data-driven tools.
Why it matters
Gulf Coast communities facing flooding and habitat loss could gain a reef system that reduces flood risk, rebuilds oyster habitat and stores carbon, with design guidelines and cost data to support adoption. Water managers in Los Angeles and other fire-affected regions could use the post-fire turbidity baseline and AI framework to anticipate and reduce downstream water quality hazards. Students would gain practical data skills for environmental problems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
NSF R2I2: Assessing and Accelerating Living Shoreline in the US Gulf Coast for Resilience and Habitat Restoration
NSF · Sep 2025 – Aug 2027
RAPID: Streamflow and water quality response to 2025 Los Angeles wildfire across fire-flood sequences
NSF · Apr 2025 – Mar 2027
Collaborative Research: CyberTraining: Implementation: Medium: Cyber Training for Open Science in Climate, Water and Environmental Sustainability
NSF · Apr 2023 – Dec 2026
Closest labs
Alejandra Ortiz
Colby College, ME·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Quantify how atoll islands have changed in size and shape over decades by combining the long Landsat satellite archive with high-resolution Planet Labs imagery, expanding a global database of atoll morphometrics.
Ming Xiao
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering
Establish ground- and drone-based monitoring of permafrost change on Alaska's North Slope, and combine it with satellite remote sensing and image processing to track erosion and subsidence.
Catalina Segura
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Determine how burning of vegetation alone versus vegetation and soil changes snow accumulation, snowmelt, streamflow and underground water storage in burned Willamette National Forest watersheds, using snow surveys, geophysics and soil infiltration tests.
The school
University of Texas at Arlington: 11 labs on PI Pages, $154M a year on research, 177 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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