Ben Mirus

My interest in science that services society combined with a passion for the outdoors led me into a career with the USGS, where I have worked on a variety of big problems. As a student intern and postdoc in California, my earliest projects used soil physics to model radio-nuclide transport in groundwater, while my current position in Colorado focuses on limiting economic losses and fatalities related to landslides. I have worked across the U.S. from the deserts of southern Nevada to the lush forests of southeast Alaska and western North Carolina studying how water moves through soil and rock, and how that ultimately influences natural resources and the built environment. I work with data at various scales, from detailed hydrologic monitoring on individual hill slopes to managing our national landslide hazards database. I conduct fieldwork and respond to landslide disasters, while also using geographic information systems and mathematical models to quantify landslide susceptibility and initiation thresholds. My research advances methods used to forecast rainfall-triggered landslides through improved quantitative understanding of hillslope hydrological processes. I am also developing novel approaches for mapping where people and critical infrastructure are exposed to different types of landslides and hence pose the greatest threat to society.