Why soil
Most people walk past soil without a second thought. I can't. To me it's the most quietly astonishing material on Earth — a living, structured, breathing system that feeds us, filters our water, and holds more carbon than the atmosphere and all the world's plants combined. I've spent my career trying to read the physics written into that structure: how soil holds and releases water, how it builds and loses its architecture, and how the pores we can't see decide whether a seed thrives or a field goes dry.
What I study
My research lives where measurement, theory, and computation meet. In the lab and the field we ask how soil structure governs the movement of water and air; in theory we build models of aggregation, water retention, and the biogeochemistry that follows; and increasingly we teach machines to respect the laws of physics so they can predict how soil behaves. The through-line is simple — understand the living soil well enough to help feed a growing world without exhausting the ground beneath it. The lab's name is a small confession of that obsession: SOIL — Structure, Organization, and Interactions in Living-Soils.
Beyond the lab
Away from the models, I'm a photography enthusiast. Fieldwork has a way of depositing you in extraordinary places — Yosemite's granite, the hills of Rwanda, a soil pit in the Sahel at golden hour — and I try to keep a camera close. I also write essays, mostly for myself; I'm shy about sharing them, but a few may surface here over time. And I tinker — small web projects, some just for fun (a fan tracker for the Eritrean cyclist Biniam Girmay), some because they needed to exist — like the community COVID dashboard I hand-built for Merced in the scary early days of the pandemic, when reliable local numbers were hard to come by.
Get in touch
I'm always glad to hear from prospective students and postdocs curious about soil physics, from collaborators with a hard problem, and from anyone who simply wants to talk soil, water, and climate. Email is best: taghezzehei@ucmerced.edu. New here? Start with the research or the publications — or, if you'd rather just look, the photography is a gentler door in.