Pengfei Xue

Pengfei Xue is a professor of water resources in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering at Michigan Tech and is the associate director of Michigan Tech's Great Lakes Research Center. Xue's research focuses on developing and applying numerical models to address hydrodynamic, climate, and environmental challenges in the Great Lakes system. His current work involves an Integrated Regional Earth System Model (IRESM) for the Great Lakes, which includes coupled components such as atmosphere, lake, ice, waves, sediment, land surface, and biology, enhanced by data assimilation and machine learning techniques. By using the IRESM to simulate and analyze regional processes across various spatiotemporal scales, Xue and his team, in collaboration with other scientists and experts, aim to understand and predict the Great Lakes system's response to natural and anthropogenic disturbances, including climate variability, extreme events, coastal hazards, and other biophysical processes. Xue's doctoral studies in oceanography at the University of Massachusetts Intercampus Marine Science program, his postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his ongoing research have also exposed him to various marine systems, including the Maritime Continent, the Persian/Arabian Gulf, the East China Sea, the Changjiang Estuary, the Gulf of Maine, and Massachusetts coastal waters. Xue holds a joint appointment as a geophysical scientist in the Environmental Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. This collaboration aims to develop a more comprehensive predictive understanding of coastal systems by applying IRESMs on broader scales.