Research Description
Dr. Fox is an environmental water resources professor in civil engineering at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky USA. Fox’s research team uses a mixture of experimental, numerical modeling, and field-based approaches to investigate river and watershed physics and biogeochemistry. Fox’s team aims to provide fundamental knowledge and guidance for engineers to best restore and maintain rivers and their interactions with human systems. Fox’s projects center on sediment transport, optimal river design structures, fluvial carbon cycling, and nutrient fate and transport in watersheds. Their team advanced knowledge of a number of sediment, fluid and soil related phenomena including, carbon physical mixing and mineralization in soils, interrill/rill and headcut soil erosion, fluid macroturbulence in rivers, fluid boundary layer solutions for river science, interactions of biologically-active riverbeds with erosion-deposition mechanics, biogeochemistry in river boundary layers, physics of light in estuaries, sediment transport in karst caves, interaction of natural particle bridging and turbulence in riverbeds, connectivity of landscape and river processes, and the variance structure of land use change and climate change impacting hydrologic systems. Recent noteworthy method advancements by Fox and his collaborators include, derivation of dimensionless numbers for sediment research and applications, derivation of an energy model for macroturbulence for rivers, development of watershed numerical models that couple stable isotope tracers, and development of new sensors and applications of sensors for watershed studies.
Research Interest
Water resources