Background/Biography

My research explores the effects of armed conflict on water resources, focusing specifically on groundwater. My project centers on the Syrian portion of the Orontes River Basin, a region of fertile agricultural land heavily irrigated and exploited from the 1960s until the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2011. With the war, much of the cropland was abandoned, and irrigation infrastructure was destroyed, resulting in a significant, large-scale recovery of groundwater—a unique phenomenon in both duration and spatial extent. Due to limited field data from conflict zones, I am developing remote sensing techniques to detect and analyze this groundwater recovery.