Jeffrey R. Koseff

Jeffrey R. Koseff

Jeffrey R. Koseff, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering and Director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, was the dinner speaker at the May 2008 CCST Council meeting. His talk was titled “The Water-Energy Nexus: California’s Grand Challenge.” Koseff has been instrumental in developing the vision for the interdisciplinary work on environmental issues at Stanford. The William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Professor of Civil and Environmental engineering and The Michael Forman University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Professor Koseff served on the Provost Committee for the Environment and the advisory committees for the undergraduate Earth Systems Program; the Goldman Interschool Honors Program in Environmental Science, Technology and Policy; the Global Climate and Energy Project; and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources.

Koseff served as Director of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory from 1991 to 1996, after a 6-year stint as Associate Director. In 1995 he was appointed as Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and served in this capacity until September 1999, when he assumed the role of Senior Associate Dean of the School of Engineering until December, 2002. Prior to coming to Stanford as a graduate student in 1977, Koseff worked as a consulting engineer in South Africa, where he was born and educated initially.

Koseff’s research area falls in the emerging interdisciplinary domain of environmental fluid mechanics and focuses on the interaction between physical and biological systems in natural aquatic environments. His research activities are in the general area of environmental fluid mechanics and focus on: turbulence and internal wave dynamics in stratified flows, transport and mixing in estuarine systems, phytoplankton dynamics in estuarine systems, coral reef and kelp-forest hydrodynamics, chemical sensing in the marine environment, and coastal upwelling processes. Long-term research projects include understanding the transport of mass and energy in estuarine systems such as San Francisco Bay, and understanding how the coral reef systems of the Red Sea and Hawaii and the kelp forest systems of California function.

He is the recipient of several awards, including the Knapp Award in Fluids Engineering from the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), and an outstanding service award from the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE), as well as a number of teaching awards at Stanford. In 1994 he was named a University Fellow, and in 1995 he was named a 3-year Bing Teaching Fellow at Stanford. Professor Koseff was a Gledden Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Water Research at the University of Western Australia in 1991. He serves on the Board of Governors of The Israel Institute of Technology, and is also a member of the Visiting Committees of the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at Carnegie-Mellon University, The Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, and The WHOI-MIT Joint Program. He is a former member of the Independent Science Board of the Bay/Delta Authority.