Researcher of the Month

Dr. Jim Best

Dr. Jim Best has just arrived at the University of Illinois as part of the University CWACES hiring initiative, and the campus faculty excellence recruitment program. Dr. Best is settling into Champaign-Urbana after moving from the U.K., where he held a personal research chair in process sedimentology at the University of Leeds. He has a 50% appointment in Geography and a 50% appointment in Geology at UIUC, and also has an affiliate appointment in the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems laboratory in Civil and Environmental Engineering. In Geology, Dr. Best is proud to be the first holder of the Jack and Richard Threet chair in Sedimentary Geology.

Dr. Best completed his undergraduate degree in both Geography and Geology at the University of Leeds, and then spent one year working in the hydrocarbons industry, offshore in the North Sea and onshore in Denmark. After this, he returned to academia and attended Birkbeck College, University of London, where he received his Ph.D. The focus of his doctoral research was on flow dynamics and sediment transport at river channel confluences, using both physical modeling and study of several field sites in the U.K. He then held a lectureship in Geology at the University of Hull, before returning to Leeds 18 years ago. At Leeds, Dr. Best held the positions of Lecturer in Earth Sciences and Reader in Experimental Sedimentology, before being awarded his personal chair.

Dr. Best’s area of research is process sedimentology, with a major focus on rivers. He has always been fascinated by the interactions between moving fluids, sediment transport, and how these shape the landscape. This fascination has led him to work on environments from rivers to lakes to processes associated with the sedimentology of the deep seas. His approach has been largely experimental, and he was instrumental in establishing the leading sedimentological fluid dynamics laboratory in Europe at Leeds. Dr. Best has focused research in both modern and ancient environments, attempting to adopt the old axiom of using the present to interpret the geologic past, as well as vice versa. His fieldwork has involved him in major projects and long-lived collaborations in Bangladesh, New Zealand, Canada, Argentina and Chile, with much of this work being located on some of the largest rivers in the world, such as the Jamuna in Bangladesh and Paraná in Argentina. Additionally, work in Canada during the past few years has focused on fluvially-generated density currents entering lakes, and the implications of these results for both interpretation of the stratigraphic record and management of man-made water bodies. Also, in the past couple of years, Dr. Best has been interested in the issues of scaling processes from small-scale laboratory experiments to the biggest rivers, and identifying those processes that may be scale invariant and those which may not.

His research has consistently been positioned at the interface between Geology, Geography and Engineering. Consequently, he expresses excitement about his involvement with CWACES, as the center provides the framework for researchers across these disciplines to interact. He would like to use this opportunity to help shape a research portfolio, through CWACES, with Geology, Geography, and Engineering. From Illinois, Dr. Best plans to continue and expand his collaborative work at sites he has already established worldwide and would like to play a role in developing a research group interested in large rivers and ecohydraulics. He is also keen to study the processes occurring in impounded rivers, such as in the Yellow River in China, and how this information can be used to help interpret the stratigraphic record. Dr. Best also plans to focus research within Illinois and the Midwest as well, by taking investigative methods he has established at previous sites and applying them to the rivers of the Midwest. For instance, for one river, the Wabash, he plans to revisit the pioneering sedimentological work done during the 1970s, and based out of UIUC, with modern technology to see what can be discovered with these “new eyes.”