Professor Variano's teaching and research focus on environmental fluid mechanics & the physics of fluid motion in the environment. This includes a variety of phenomena on a variety of scales, from microscopic mixing to the coupled ocean-atmosphere system that transports heat and Carbon Dioxide around the globe. An understanding of fluid mechanics is crucial for an engineer whose goal is to restore or preserve a natural environment (e.g., wetlands, rivers, or the ocean) or design a system in which water or air flow must be controlled (e.g., ventilation, treatment, or turbomachinery). The basics of such work are covered in classes such as CE100 (Elementary Fluid Mechanics), CE101 (Fluid Mechanics of Rivers, Streams, and Wetlands), and CE200C (Mixing and Transport in the Environment).

In his research, Professor Variano develops cutting-edge experimental techniques to make measurements of fluid phenomena. He is particularly interested in the phenomena of turbulence and solute transport. In these phenomena, one can only understand the large-scale behavior (e.g., how fast will this pollutant plume spread) via the microscale behavior (e.g., what are the stochastic properties of the velocity fluctuations).