The World’s largest rivers suffer from a paucity of knowledge about how they currently function, how they have evolved through time and how they may respond to future environmental changes. This lack of knowledge matters to the millions of people who live and work on their floodplains but also to society more widely as large river deposits from some of the World’s most important water aquifers and the movement of sediment through rivers is key for replenishing downstream deltas to offset sea level rise. Rivers may also become sinks for emerging pollutants such as microplastics, about which currently very little is known.

As a process-based fluvial sedimentologist, Professor Sambrook Smith has developed river science by blending, field, experimental and numerical methods to generate a new perspective which bridges temporal and spatial scales to provide a holistic framework for understanding both modern and ancient systems. His research generates new, generic and quantitative understanding of how rivers function across these scales. This is facilitated by development of new techniques such as endoscopic particle imaging velocimetry for use in porous media or application of geophysical techniques for fluvial context.