Dr Anna Herring

Anna is originally from a small coal-mining community in Colorado, and has been an avid outdoors sports enthusiast- whitewater kayaking, snowboarding, mountain biking- since childhood. She studied environmental engineering (B.S. from University of Colorado, Boulder; and M.S. and Ph.D. from Oregon State University) because she is personally invested in resolving the conflicts between environmental protection and energy production necessary for modern life. She was an ARC DECRA postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University, where her research enabled efficient design and optimization of technologies used to fight climate change: storing carbon dioxide in permeable underground geologic formations, and in cements used in construction.

Anna’s research is largely experimental, and is based on highly-resolved visualization of fluid (gas and liquid) flows within permeable media. She applies state-of-the-art visualization techniques to observe complicated 3D solid architecture and flow patterns, on a micro-scale basis, in otherwise opaque samples; and she uses image processing and mathematical topology to quantify fluid-solid structures and interactions. She recently produced the first experimental evidence that micro-scale fluid topology dictates reservoir-scale flow and transport parameters used by engineers. She also investigates how transport of fluids through samples can cause chemical reactions, altering solid surface chemistry and transforming solid structures over time; and she looks at how these reactive transport mechanisms can be manipulated to optimize flow processes in different natural and designed scenarios.

Her research spans temporal and spatial scales, chemistry and physics, and fundamental science and applied engineering topics.