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Alban Sauret, Clark Faculty Fellow and associate professor in the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been selected by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for its 2025 cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators.
The highly prestigious honor comes with a five-year, $1.3 million grant that will support Sauret’s research concerning destructive debris flows that can occur in the wake of wildfires.
When organic matter is burnt during a wildfire, the remaining layer soil becomes water-repellent. If a heavy rainstorm follows the fire, the loose soil layer can transform into a dense, fast-moving mudflow that spills down sloping terrain without warning. Lives can be lost and infrastructure destroyed as a result.
Sauret and his team at UMD will develop physics-based models that could help clarify how such flows are triggered in such a short time and thus improve our ability to predict them. More specifically, the team aims to better understand the process by which intense rain turns the post-wildfire soil layer into mudlows, honing in on how raindrop impact, turbulent runoff, and slope combine to carve out rills and create the dense slurries that lead to swift mudflows.
“We want to understand and model the moment when rain on burned soil turns into a fast, dense debris flow,” Sauret said. “If we can predict the conditions for that switch, forecasts could improve and communities gain time.”
The funding, he said, “will help us build a controlled rainstorm in the lab and watch every drop. We will measure forces, flows, and grain motion at high speed.”
A UMD faculty member since January 2025, Sauret earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in physics in France and completed a postdoctoral research position at Princeton University. He then joined the CNRS National Institute of Physics in France, holding a position there between 2014 and 2018 in a joint academic-industrial laboratory with Saint-Gobain. From 2018 to 2024, he held a faculty position at the University of California Santa Barbara.
His research lies at the intersection of fluid mechanics, soft matter, interfacial dynamics, and granular physics, aiming to understand the dynamics of multiphase systems for a broad range of applications, from manufacturing to water sustainability and geosciences. He has received various awards, such as a Soft Matter Emerging Investigator Award in 2017 and a Pioneering Investigator Award in 2024 from the Royal Society of Chemistry, an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, an American Physical Society Milton van Dyke Award in 2021, and an ASME Rising Star of Mechanical Engineering Award in 2024.
October 8, 2025
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