Team
Dr. Rafael M. Almeida
Principal Investigator · Assistant Professor, O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University
Rafael Almeida is an ecosystem scientist who studies how human activities reshape aquatic ecosystems and the benefits they provide. He is particularly interested in engineered aquatic systems, asking how infrastructure alters the movement of water, energy, carbon, and nutrients, and how those changes affect ecosystems and infrastructure alike.
His work spans hydropower, reservoirs, aquaculture, and solar energy, with a focus on carbon cycling, water quality, hydrology, and biodiversity. He combines ecological fieldwork and experiments with remote sensing, modeling, and data science to connect processes at individual sites with patterns across regions and the globe. His research has advanced basin-scale approaches to hydropower planning and our understanding of the carbon consequences of reservoirs and expanding aquaculture systems. A growing focus of his work is the ecological consequences of bringing solar energy onto water.
Honors include the Society for Freshwater Science’s Hynes Award for New Investigators (2021), the University of Texas System Rising STARS Award (2022), and a Cornell Atkinson Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sustainability (2018).
Lab members
Aline Valerio
Postdoctoral Associate
Aline holds a Ph.D. in Remote Sensing from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research and is particularly interested in remote sensing applications that enhance the monitoring and conservation of aquatic ecosystems. Her current work focuses on using satellite imagery to quantify impacts of floating solar arrays on aquatic environments.
Augusto Del Claro
Ph.D. Student
Augusto is a Ph.D. student in Environmental Science at Indiana University and holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from the Federal University of Uberlândia (Brazil). His research examines the energy system and ecosystem benefits and trade-offs of floating solar energy.
Sushobhan Bhattarai
Master’s Student
Suso is a Master of Environmental Sustainability student at Indiana University and holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kathmandu University (Nepal). His research focuses on environmental screening of prospective pumped storage hydropower in the Western Balkans.
Former lab members
- Freny Reji · Master’s student
- Maria Camila Mejia Garcia · Ph.D. student
- Deisy Garcia · Master’s student
- Siena Stassi · Master’s student
- Marcelo Gomes da Silva · Associate research scientist
- Simone Cardoso · Associate research scientist
- Alexuss Jauregui · Program coordinator
- Areefin Chowdhury · Master’s student
- Ifeoluwa Babarinde · Master’s student
- John Rodriguez · Undergraduate student
- Gabriela Salinas · Undergraduate student