Zbigniew J. Kabala earned his M.S. degree in civil engineering in 1980 from Poznan Polytechnic in Poznan, Poland, and his M.S. degree in mathematics in 1982 from A. Mickiewicz University in Poznan. At Princeton, he earned another M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in civil engineering and operations research in 1985 and 1988, respectively. Next, Dr. Kabala held one-year postdoctoral appointments at MIT and Berkeley. He was then appointed an Assistant Professor of hydrology at UC Riverside in the Department of Soils and Environmental Sciences. He joined the Duke faculty as an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the summer of 1994. Dr. Kabala served as Director of Graduate Studies from 2003-2006, Faculty in Residence from 2005-2023, Member of the Duke Center for Computational Thinking from 2022-Present, and a 2024-2025 Climate and Sustainability Teaching Fellow. Mentor to many students, he won the Earl I. Brown II Outstanding Civil Engineering Faculty Award in 2005 and 2017. His research interests include groundwater hydrology, soil physics, fluid mechanics, and machine learning. He does most of his analytic and numerical research in Wolfram Language (Mathematica), but does not shy away from Ansys Fluent or Comsol. Also, as an avid member of Toastmasters International, where he honed his public speaking skills and helped students and postdocs do the same, Dr. Kabala earned the Distinguished Toastmaster award in 2013, 2014, and 2018.
