Twenty Lessons Drawn From My Subsurface Hydrology Career

Abstract

This personal perspective complements a Brief Autobiography I (Figure 1) wrote for the journal Ground Water (Neuman, 2008). Whereas there I described my personal life from early childhood to my career stage at the time, here I focus on key science lessons my academic research, teaching, and professional consulting have taught me. Though many of these lessons have been shared with students and colleagues throughout my career, never have I had the opportunity to collect and summarize them for a wider audience as I do here. I thank the Editors for the opportunity to do so, Professor Emeritus Steve Burgess of the University of Washington and Professor Alberto Guadagnini of the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, for helping me to do so better, and hope readers will find some of these lessons intriguing enough to explore and develop the related ideas further. Work conducted jointly by my students, coworkers, and myself over the last half century has taught us 20 important lessons about subsurface hydrology We would never have learned these lessons without advanced knowledge of geology, physics of flow and transport through geologic media, and analytical as well as computational mathematics and statistics It is heartening to see that more and more university curricula offer balanced, advanced, and integrated training in all these and related areas