Qi Zhou

Dr. Qi Zhou has been a faculty member in the Department of Civil Engineering since 2017. Before moving to Canada, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Dr. Zhou completed his PhD thesis on internal waves and stratified turbulence at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 2015. Before moving to Cornell in 2010, he studied at Stanford University in California and at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Dr. Zhou’s research uses numerical, analytical and experimental tools to study the movement of water in natural and engineered systems, such as oceans, estuaries, lakes and reservoirs. The environmental quality of these systems depends critically on the fluid flows through and within them, and understanding the fluid mechanics of these flows is crucial for an engineer whose goal is to describe or predict the influences of these physical processes on the environment, for example, how turbulent mixing which occurs at a very small scale could affect the overall distribution of heat, nutrients and pollutants within the bodies of natural waters.

In his research, Dr. Zhou performs cutting-edge computer simulations of flow processes of interest at parameter values as close as possible to those encountered in the environment. High-performance parallel computing is routinely used for these simulations, and state-of-the-art data analytics tools are leveraged to interpret various flow phenomena and extract dynamical insights from the big data generated by massive simulations. Dr. Zhou’s research aims at developing simple yet robust models which are capable of predicting the impact of climate change and other human influences on Canada’s most precious water resources. The research is inherently interdisciplinary and involves interactions with fluid dynamicists, oceanographers, applied mathematicians and computer scientists.

Research areas

• Engineering for the environment
• Intelligent and autonomous systems
• Clean technology
• Environment and climate change
• Software and analytics
• Water and wastewater technologies
• Pollutant fate and transport
• Assessing risk and mitigating hazards
• Climate change adaptation
• Sustainable water management
• Advanced analytics and AI
• Scientific computing
• Computational fluid dynamics