This site has been running in various forms since 2009. It began as plain HTML and CSS, migrated through a brief and regrettable WordPress period, and has lived on Jekyll ever since. The current design was refined in 2026 with help from Claude Code.

The name is an inversion. The field is called soil physics. We call it the physics of SOIL — because the subject should set the terms, not the methodology. SOIL is also an acronym: Structure, Organization, and Interactions in Living-SOILs. The recursion is intentional.

The semicolon in the logo is also intentional. It implies continuation. We are not done.

Publications are maintained as a single BibTeX file that serves both this site and the PI's LaTeX CV. One source of truth. Everything else is derived.

Body text is set in SF Pro Text (with fallbacks to Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, and system sans-serif). The handwritten captions in the gallery are set in Permanent Marker — used only there, for reasons that should be apparent.

Photographs are the PI's own unless otherwise noted. The soil aggregate on the homepage was photographed in a lightbox at UC Merced.

All content represents the views of the Ghezzehei Lab and does not reflect the positions of the University of California, Merced or any funding agency.