Jeffrey R. Koseff

Jeffrey Koseff is a co-director at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and professor of Chemical Enginnering by courtesy.

A native of South Africa, Jeff Koseff focuses his research on the interaction between physical and biological systems in natural aquatic environments. His research activities are in the general area of environmental fluid mechanics and focus on: turbulence and internal wave dynamics in stratified flows, transport and mixing in estuarine systems, phytoplankton dynamics in estuarine systems, coral reef, sea-grass, and kelp-forest hydrodynamics and transport processes, chemical sensing in the marine environment, and coastal upwelling processes.

After joining the CEE faculty in 1984, Koseff was promoted to full professor in 1996. He served as Director of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory from 1991 to 1996, after a 6 year stint as Associate Director. In 1995 Koseff was appointed as Chair of CEE and served in this capacity until September 1999, when he assumed the role of Senior Associate Dean of the School of Engineering until December, 2002.

He has worked as a consulting engineering in South Africa. He is the co-recipient of the 1986 Robert T Knapp Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for work he did on the lid-driven cavity flow, and in 1988 he received an Outstanding Service Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Professor Koseff has been the recipient of a number of teaching awards at Stanford, including the Stanford School of Engineering Tau Beta Pi Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching (1989), an ASSU Outstanding Teaching Award (1992), the Rhodes Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1993), and the Eugene L. Grant Award (1995). In 1994 he was named a University Fellow, and in 1995 he was named a 3-year Bing Teaching Fellow at Stanford. In 2003 Koseff was appointed as Director (jointly with Buzz Thompson) of the newly formed Stanford Institute for the Environment, and he currently is a member of the Independent Science Board of the California Bay/Delta Authority and various ASCE technical sub-committees.

Koseff received a BS at University of Witwatersrand in 1976, an MS in 1978, and a PhD at Stanford University in 1983.