Rate My Professor Michael Cardiff

Michael Cardiff is Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, holding a joint appointment in Civil and Environmental Engineering. He received a B.A. with dual majors in Mathematics and Geology from Oberlin College in 2001. From 2001 to 2004, he worked as an environmental consultant in Arlington, Virginia. Cardiff earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, where his doctoral research under Peter K. Kitanidis developed methods for analyzing hydraulic and geophysical data to image subsurface aquifer properties and improve flow and transport predictions. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Boise State University under Warren Barrash, designing field applications of hydrogeophysical imaging, including 3D aquifer characterization via hydraulic tomography. In 2012, Cardiff joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as Assistant Professor in Geoscience.

Cardiff's research specializes in hydrogeology, focusing on aquifer heterogeneity across spatial scales and its impacts on water supply protection, geothermal energy extraction, contaminant monitoring, and agricultural nitrate loading to groundwater. His group combines multi-physics numerical modeling, stochastic and Bayesian inference, optimization, field studies, laboratory experiments, hydrologic sensors, and geophysical methods like poroelastic tomography and oscillatory pumping. Current projects include the DOE-funded Adjoint Applications of Poroelastic Tomography (PoroTomo) integrating hydrologic, geophysical, and satellite data for geothermal reservoirs; Wisconsin DNR efforts on pressure wave analysis for fracture flow geometry; a WARF project building a visible fracture for transport imaging; and a DNR nitrate pilot using modeling and monitoring for agricultural impacts. He teaches GEOSCI/GLE 627 Hydrogeology, GEOSCI/GLE 724 Groundwater Flow Modeling, GEOSCI/GLE 875 MATLAB for Geoscientists, GEOSCI/GLE 106 Environmental Geology, and GEOSCI/GLE 793 Geophysical Inverse Modeling. Cardiff received the 2015 GSA Hydrogeology Division Kohout Early Career Award, the Straub Award for his Ph.D. dissertation, and the 2013 AGU Editor’s Citation for Excellence in Refereeing. His contributions advance subsurface imaging, hydraulic tomography, and environmental decision-making under uncertainty, including an invited keynote at NovCare 2013 and essays shaping hydrogeology's future.