Kerry Lee Callaghan

Dr. Kerry Lee Callaghan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on palaeohydrology, regional/global hydrology, and landscape analysis, using computational tools like the Water Table Model (WTM) and Fill-Spill-Merge (FSM) framework. She holds a PhD in Earth Science from the University of Minnesota (2020) and completed postdoctoral research at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (Columbia University, 2021–2022).

Education: B.Sc. Earth Science (University of Pretoria, 2010); B.Sc. Hons. Geology (Stellenbosch University, 2011); M.Sc. Geoinformatics (Stellenbosch University, 2014).

Research interests include modeling water table dynamics, integrating groundwater and lake systems into global hydrology, and developing computational methods for analyzing landscape features such as depressions. Recent work includes predicting future water table changes under climate scenarios and advancing tools like FSM for hydrological connectivity studies.

She mentors graduate students and postdocs, including Mohammad (PhD student) and Xuezhi Cang (postdoc), and collaborates internationally. Her research group emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches, combining geoscience with computational methods.