New Faculty Profile

Hitting fast forward:

First-time faculty member, hydrogeologist Bayani Cardenas, is anxious to get his feet wet

AUSTIN, Texas—To collect data for his master’s thesis, Bayani Cardenas would often go out into the middle of a river carrying a laptop computer and data loggers. He was measuring permeability of sediments—their ability to transmit fluids.

“I didn’t want to drop the computer in the river, especially since it was not mine. I thought there had to be a better way,” he said. So he developed a technique that was just as accurate, but didn’t require any electronics.

At the time, he didn’t think a graduate student could make much of an impact on his field. Yet scientists and consultants around the world are now using his technique.

He knows because he has gotten frustrated emails—some from as far away as France and Hungary. The correspondents, referring to the paper describing the technique in a 2003 issue of the journal Ground Water, write things like, “Your technique doesn’t work!”

Cardenas politely writes back that the paper has a typo. An equation is missing a bracket. Now he’s publishing the first “errata,” or correction, of his professional career.

“Most geologists deal with millions-of-year timescales,” Cardenas said. “I like to see things happen in front of my eyes. That’s why I study surface water/ground water interactions."

For most scientists, this would be disappointing. Instead, he said, “I’m flattered by it. I didn’t think anyone would read it. It was in a very applied journal. That was three years ago and now all this time later, people still say, ‘Hey, it’s not working.’ It’s a rewarding experience. It makes you want to do more and do it better.“

Fast Foward

Cardenas joined the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences as an assistant professor this past summer.

He studies how water flowing on Earth’s surface in streams and rivers (surface water) interacts with water flowing below the surface (ground water). Specifically, he studies how heat and chemicals are exchanged between the two. This work has implications for how pollutants are transported through the environment.

“Most geologists deal with millions-of-year timescales,” Cardenas said. “I like to see things happen in front of my eyes. That’s why I study surface water/ground water interactions. I want to study something tangible. I like to see both the process and the product.”

Though a first-time faculty member, Cardenas already feels familiar with the professional academic’s basic mix of duties—teaching, research, and proposal writing, all of which he pursued as a doctoral student at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He does, however, look forward to having more resources and not having the pressure to finish a degree.

Cardenas used rhodamine dye in a stream as a tracer.

But mostly, he is just anxious to get started.

When we spoke at the start of the fall semester, he was writing grant proposals. He planned to take in students who are interested in collaborating on his research. He was preparing for an environmental hydrogeology course he plans to teach in the spring. And he was working with a company in Minnesota to build a five-meter flume, which he describes as a cross between a sandbox and a fish tank that mimics a riverbed.

"If you go to the river, you can't cut a slice through it," said Cardenas. "The flume allows you to dig a trench down into the sediments and look at the cross section without getting wet."

He had returned from a field trip to test out a new infrared camera that will allow him to quickly measure temperatures across the surface of a river. It was his first original work while at the Jackson School. He and his collaborators are writing a paper about the test for publication.

In September 2006, Cardenas went into the field to test out a new infrared camera that will allow him to quickly measure temperatures across the surface of a river.

And then there are the mundane aspects of a new job. Cardenas was still assembling his office furniture, deciding where his books and other belongings will live and trying to figure out the voice mail.

“I’d like to hit fast forward and see what it’s like two or three years from now," he said. "Right now, it’s like a diesel engine warming up. Starting off is slow, especially if you don’t have students.

From the Philippines to Texas

Cardenas grew up in the Philippines. In the summers, he and his family would go to a cabin several hours from their home.

“My parents really liked the outdoors. And I enjoyed swimming in the river, hiking and camping,” he said. “So I thought studying the water cycle would be a good way to stay outside.”

He did a lot of field work at a Nebraska field site for his master’s degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Hence the fear of dropping computers in the river.

But my Ph.D. was all modeling and it involved no field work,” he said. “So now I’m hoping to get out in the field more.” The problem is, he related, once colleagues and advisors discover you are good at computer modeling, they encourage you to do more of it.

"If you go to the river, you can't cut a slice through it," said Cardenas. "The flume allows you to dig a trench down into the sediments and look at the cross section without getting wet." This flume, much larger than the one Cardenas is constructing, is 70 feet long. Image: Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center, U.S. Dept. of Transportation. Larger image.

Cardenas also got an early interest in the natural world from National Geographic magazine. His grandparents bought his older brother a lifetime subscription to the magazine back in 1971. “Back then, it cost something like $100. Of course, we would get them two months late in the Philippines, but that magazine made a big impression on me.”

While an undergraduate at the University of the Philippines Diliman in Manila, Cardenas worked several jobs to pay for outdoor hobbies such as caving, hiking and mountain climbing.

In one job, he helped train park rangers in “Leave No Trace Ethics.” Most park rangers in the Philippines are subsistence farmers who live in the wilderness and have no formal education.

“Even though they have inherited environment-friendly lifestyles from their ancestors, some have a hard time coming to grips with modernization, like tourists flocking into their areas and asking for guides or porters,” Cardenas said. He helped introduce park rangers to behavior that they should expect of tourists.

“Some guides are more than willing to take the tourists’ money and just do as they are told, like take people to an ancient burial site,” he said. “When they get there, they inadvertently trash the place.”

In another job, he helped develop alternative livelihoods for locals. For example, he said, “if managed properly, coral reefs can provide sustained income to coastal communities if they are fished moderately and promoted for tourism as well. This would be an alternative to just fishing as much as they can to make as much money as they can.”

Cardenas did his Ph.D. research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology with advisor John Wilson. The goal was to represent real world hydrologic processes more accurately in computer models.

Cardenas performing hydraulic field tests as a master's student. Larger image.

People often look at hydrologic systems in simplified ways out of necessity, but I use a more brute force approach,” Cardenas said. “I keep adding things in to make the models more and more realistic. It’s a bottom-up approach.”

As a graduate student, Cardenas won numerous honors and awards. In 2002, he was the first recipient of the Frank Kottlowski Fellowship, given by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. That fellowship, which was created as a memorial to the former director of the bureau, funded part of Cardenas’s Ph.D. research.

In 2004, he received an Outstanding Student Paper award from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) for a presentation he gave on his dissertation research. In 2005, he received a Horton Research Grant, the highest award that AGU gives to hydrology graduate students.

Cardenas is married and has a four-year-old son. He and his wife met through a mountaineering club when they were students in the Philippines. That seems appropriate for a geologist.

“I think it’s great,” Cardenas said, “when you can combine work and play.”

For more information about the Jackson School contact J.B. Bird at jbird@jsg.utexas.edu, 512-232-9623.