Prospective PhD Students

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I welcome prospective Ph.D. students interested in the quantitative study of climate hazard, risk, and resilience. Our research bridges climate science, hydrology, statistics, and decision science to address challenges in climate hazard, risk, and resilience.

What we work on

Right now the group is heavily focused on urban flooding, along two lines:

  • Decision-making under uncertainty: managing trade-offs for adaptation decisions, moving past traditional and computationally expensive cost-benefit analysis.
  • Hazard characterization: modeling probabilistic rainfall and building physics-informed machine learning tools to quantify flood impacts, so that many adaptations can be analyzed under a range of possible conditions.

Related topics that interest me but fall outside what the group will take on in the next year or two – cloud seeding, cloud cover and radiation – are better pursued with a faculty member whose primary work is in that area. I am happy to suggest people to contact.

Who fits

Students come in from physics, math, statistics, computer science, and engineering, not only from hydrology or climate science. Some domain knowledge has to be picked up, but curious and motivated students with quantitative training who have not yet been taught “how we do things” often ask questions that people trained inside the field would not think to ask.

Open Positions

Current openings are listed on the Join Us page. If you have external funding or a research idea that aligns with the group’s work, reach out even if no position is posted.

How to Apply

All candidates must apply through Rice University’s formal application process. I strongly encourage you to get in touch before applying, through the form in step 2 below, to assess whether our group is a good fit for your goals.

Application Process

  1. Self-Assessment: Review our publications and lab values to determine whether your research interests and working style align with our group.

  2. Prospective Student Information Form: Submit the Prospective Student Information Form. It asks for your CV, transcript, and a brief statement of interest. I know that at this stage you are reaching out to many groups, so I’ve kept the form as short as possible. I review submissions regularly and will follow up within a week or two. Please use the form rather than emailing your materials. If Google Forms is not accessible in your location, email me and I will send you the questions directly.

  3. Papers: If there’s good alignment based on your submission, I’ll send a few papers that give a sense of what the group does. Read them and tell me what you thought: what caught your attention, what you’d want to do differently, what you didn’t follow. I’m not asking whether you can summarize a paper – AI tools do that well. I want to know what you’re excited about and how you think.

  4. Video Chat: If something in the papers grabbed you, I’ll schedule a video chat to talk about what you made of them, along with your interests, goals, and potential research directions. This is a casual conversation to assess mutual fit.

  5. Formal Application: You must apply to the Ph.D. program in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University, regardless of our preliminary conversations. See the department’s graduate programs page and Rice’s graduate admission guidelines for requirements and deadlines. Rice offers Application Fee Waiver Weeks to reduce financial barriers to applying.

Before you apply

You cannot and should not have your entire career mapped out yet. Still, I encourage every prospective student to think hard about four things:

  1. The scientific questions you actually want to answer. Most applicants coming from outside the field do not have a well-calibrated sense of this yet, and that is fine. It is still worth thinking about.
  2. The end-users you want to engage with. A Ph.D. means learning to write for scientists and researchers. Beyond that, do you want to be your favorite scientist’s favorite scientist? Someone influencing local policy? Someone assessing national flood policy? In practice this gets driven by your research, but it shapes what you should look for. In my case, undergraduate work on drinking water supply with rural communities in Paraguay and Brazil got me interested in how we fund, manage, and design infrastructure, and how we recover from extremes.
  3. Your day-to-day life. For our group this mostly means sitting at a computer coding, with occasional fieldwork and stakeholder interviews.
  4. The group dynamics and mentoring style you thrive in. Do you want a supervisor who checks in frequently, or someone you talk to about more independent research? Do you want to look at plots with your lab mates and run projects together, or learn about their work while mostly doing your own thing and collaborating on specific tasks and tools? No style is right, but it is worth thinking hard about.

How to write a good application

Although your application is assessed holistically, you should focus on crafting the statement of purpose to make sure that it clearly and obviously answers all of these questions. A good statement of purpose should clearly articulate:

  1. How would joining this lab group advance your career and life goals?
  2. What kind of research would you like to carry out in your Ph.D.?
  3. How does your current skill-set map to the needs for the project? What will you need to learn?
  4. Why is James the right supervisor for you to carry out this research?
  5. What synergies do you see with the group?

If your statement of purpose does not directly address these questions, it is unlikely to stand out and will decrease your chances of being accepted. In an era where AI tools can generate grammatically correct and well-structured essays, what distinguishes strong applications is authentic voice and perspective. Essays that reveal your individual thinking, motivations, and vision stand out because they require genuine human insight and reflection. A compelling statement of purpose shows who you are as a thinker, not just what you want to study.

For some additional generic advice, check out the following resources:

  1. Matt Might’s How to Get Into Grad School post (note that this is aimed at computer science, but is overall similar)
  2. this MIT guide to the statement of purpose
  3. Rice University’s guidance to the statement of purpose
  4. Chris Blattman’s Twitter Thread and blog post on writing a strong statement of purpose (tailored to economics and social sciences, but the advice is highly applicable!)

FAQs

Are positions fully funded?

In short: yes. All Ph.D. positions within the group will be fully funded. That includes tuition support, a stipend of $37,000/year (confirm exact amount in your offer letter), and other benefits – see Rice’s 2024-2025 doctoral stipend announcement. You will get more details in your formal offer letter if accepted.

Should I write a research proposal?

You should include some research goals and ideas in your statement of purpose, but don’t write a separate research proposal. See the advice listed above for more details.

How is it the best way to find a master/Phd opportunity?

When you’re applying to an undergraduate program, you care the most about the university. When applying to a PhD (in engineering at least), you care the most about the research group you will be working with.

Start by thinking about what kind of research you want to do. Do you like lab work or computational work? What problems do you want to solve? What classes do you want to take? Sketch out some research ideas that interest you. Then, conduct a literature review and find out who is working in this space. Look at their web pages and papers and look for research groups that appeal to you.

How often do students usually travel for conferences?

After the first year (primarily classes) I aim to fund students to go to the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting (1 week in December) or the American Society of Civil Engineers Environment / Water Resources Institute annual meeting (1 week in May). There are also lots of smaller and more targeted workshops that are often great experiences – they often have some student travel grants and with planning we can often fund student travel.

What are things you wish more students knew before joining your program?

I got some feedback from current students for this.

  1. Balancing course requirements (roughly 6 courses – see student handbook for details) and research can be a challenge, especially for first-year graduate students who generally have the heaviest courseloads.
  2. For anyone doing modeling or data-driven work, most of your day will be spent (i) reading, (ii) writing, or (iii) coding. You should strive to improve your effectiveness in all three areas and plan to spend much of your day at a computer (which also means being deliberate about getting out of your computer!)
  3. You will get more out of grad school (this applies to any program!) if you have a clear idea of what you want to learn and what you want to get out of grad school.

What is the worst quality of life pain point that your students go through?

I got some feedback from current students for this.

  1. Trying to learn how to do research while also taking a heavy courseload can make for a tough first semester (this was also my experience).

How has the lab planned and handled for student’s growth throughout their graduate program?

I got some feedback from current students for this. We’re still figuring this out and will continue to adapt as we learn more. Students learn best from each other, so we have regular reading groups, where we meet (often with friends from other groups) to discuss papers. We help each other prepare for conferences, give each other feedback on papers, etc. This only works in an environment where we trust each other (both giving and getting feedback require trust) so we need to hold ourselves and each other to a high standard of integrity (i.e., be trustworthy!) As a young / small group, it’s also important to have interaction with people outside the group – we have meetings and social events with other lab groups, and most students are working on collaborative projects that include people from beyond our group.

How are publication credits discussed in the lab?

Journals typically have clear expectations about what constitutes authorship and we follow those guidelines. The most important rule is to have clear conversations about authorship early on (this is the PI’s responsibility but students are always welcome to ask about authorship!)

How has the lab dealt with academic and social misconduct situations (plagiarism, bullying, harassment, misogyny, racism, transphobia, etc)?

So far we’ve been fortunate to have avoided significant academic and social misconduct. We obviously follow Rice University policies. We’ve also developed a policy on harassment and other expectations that will guide us if (when) these come up. In general we set high expectations for ourselves and for one another because a collaborative and open environment, which benefits everyone, requires mutual trust and respect.