Scott McCoy - Natural Hazards and Earth Surface Dynamics Lab

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, where I run the Natural Hazards and Earth Surface Dynamics lab. We work at the interface of Earth science and engineering, building mechanistic, predictive models of surface processes such as floods, landslides, and debris flows, which threaten communities on the time scale of a single event and, over geologic time, sculpt the mountains and river basins we live in. Across scales from grain-scale impact forces to continental river networks, we pursue basic questions about these surface processes: why and when they occur, how large they will be, which places and ecosystems are susceptible, and how their magnitude and frequency shift with changing climate, land use, and tectonics. To answer them we combine theory, computation, fieldwork, and remote sensing, working with everything from drones and satellites to high-performance landscape-evolution models.

Before joining UNR in 2014, I was a postdoctoral fellow with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, based at MIT and ETH Zürich. I earned my Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder (2012), and B.S. (Geology) and B.A. (Business Administration) degrees from the University of Washington (2005).