Ning Lu is well known internationally for his work on stresses in variably saturated porous media. His primary research interest is to seek common threads among basic soil physical phenomena including fluid flow, chemical transport, heat transfer, stress, and deformation. He pursues understanding of these phenomena at fundamental levels, including unifying atomic-scale potentials, inter-particle forces, and engineering-scale stresses in soils. He has been working on challenging engineering problems in chemical transport in clayey soil, underground nuclear waste isolation, residential house foundation damage by expansive clays, and, most recently, precipitation-induced shallow landslides. He teaches regularly on mechanics and hydrology of variably saturated porous media with the textbook Unsaturated Soil Mechanics (John Wiley and Sons, 2004) .He also teaches vadose zone hydrology and landslides with the textbook Hillslope Hydrology and Stability (N. Lu and J.W. Godt, Cambridge University Press, 2012).