We are excited to welcome Prof. Tim Ginn who is a faculty with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He will be giving a colloquium on November 5th, 2026 in Neill Hall 5w on the Pullman Campus starting at 4:00pm. His colloquium is “Math Modeling Marvels with Generalized Speedometers” and the title, Zoom details, abstract, and speaker bio can be found below. We look forward to seeing you there or on Zoom!
Title: Math Modeling Marvels with Generalized Speedometers
Meeting ID: 820 0793 3502
Passcode: 241771
Zoom Link
Abstract: So much of our modeling dreams of how dynamics work depend on the old wheelbarrow of “first-order kinetics” where the rate of flow of stuff from someplace is proportional to how much stuff remains. There’s a bunch of cases where that is not very useful. One simple trick replaces that wheelbarrow with a magic carpet that will take you to all sorts of new modelings, as well as a unicorn or three. I will introduce this trick, the generalized speedometer, and let it fly us to some new models in environmental fluid mechanics including groundwater age, solute sorption in porous media, and mixing-controlled reactions, as well as the twins’ paradox of special relativity.
Speaker Bio: Prof. Timothy Ginn received his undergraduate degrees in Classics and Hydrology from the University of Virginia (1982), and his masters (1985) and doctorate (1988) in Civil Engineering from Purdue University Civil Engineering.
Before joining the WSU faculty in 2016, he acquired 7 years of exposure time to Battelle’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory PNNL in Richland, Washington, and then 19 years of exposure time to UC Davis Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Dr. Ginn has been involved in math modeling of reactive transport of multiphase multicomponent mixtures in natural and engineered environments. His areas of specialization include reactive transport in rivers and aquifers, groundwater age and isotope-based recharge estimation, microbial-induced calcite precipitation, in situ groundwater bioremediation, subsurface bacterial transport and colloid filtration theory, modeling microbial and macrobial population dynamics and ecotoxicology, diffusive mass transfer, disinfection of particle-associated bacteria, inverse problems, and multimedia risk assessment for new fuels and chemicals.