Personal Information

I am a postdoc at Porelab and the Njord Centre at the University of Oslo, in the departments of physics and geosciences. My research focuses on environmental transport processes, including flow, transport, and reactions in porous and fractured media, and sediment transport in rivers. I am educated in multiple disciplines, with PhD training in geomorphology and hydrology, and MSc training in statistical and condensed matter physics. This background has supported my research projects that apply mathematical, computational, and experimental ideas from physics to geoscience problems.

Research Interests

Currently my main research focus is chemical transport through unsaturated flows in porous media. How chemicals migrate and react in the subsurface has become relatively well understood, but uncertainties remain about how the presence of a second fluid phase (i.e., air and water in the ground) impacts mixing and chemical reaction rates. This has important implications for our ability to remediate polluted soils and to understand nutrient dynamics in the critical zone.

Articles

• Linga, G., Pierce, J.K., Moura, M., Mathiesen, J., Renard, F., & Le Borgne, T., Dynamic multiphase flow triggers chaotic mixing in porous media, arXiv:2604.10382, 2026.

• Pierce, J.K., Le Borgne, T., Renard, F., & Linga, G., How pore-scale disorder controls fluid stretching in porous media, arXiv:2604.02981, 2026.

• Hassan, M.A., Xing, T., McDowell, C., Pierce, J.K., Turley, M., Leader-Cole, S., & Viparelli, E., Vertical sorting of bed material in gravel-bed streams—Insights from long-term observations in East Creek, British Columbia, Water Resources Research 61 (10), e2025WR041119, 2025.

• Brodin, J.F., Pierce, J.K., Reis, P., Rikvold, P.A., Moura, M., Jankov, M., & Måløy, K.J., Interface instability of two-phase flow in a three-dimensional porous medium, Physical Review Fluids 10 (6), 064003, 2025.

• Hassan, M.A., Pierce, J.K., & Chartrand, S.M., Sediment storage and fluvial sediment transport linkages across an experimental flood sequence, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface 129 (9), e2024JF007772, 2024.

• Pierce, J.K., Hassan, M.A., & Ferreira, R.M.L., Probabilistic description of bedload fluxes from the aggregate dynamics of individual grains, Earth Surface Dynamics 10 (4), 817–832, 2022.

• Pierce, J.K., An advection-diffusion process with proportional resetting. arXiv:2204.07215, 2022.

• Pierce, J.K. & Hassan, M.A., Joint stochastic bedload transport and bed elevation model: Variance regulation and power law rests, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface 125 (4), e2019JF005259, 2020.

• Pierce, J.K. & Hassan, M.A., Back to Einstein: Burial‐Induced Three‐Range Diffusion in Fluvial Sediment Transport, Geophysical Research Letters 47 (15), e2020GL087440, 2020.

• Rowley, J.D., Pierce, J.K., Brant, A.T., Halliburton, L.E., Giles, N.C., Schunemann, P.G., & Bristow, A.D., Broadband terahertz pulse emission from ZnGeP₂, Optics Letters 37 (5), 788–790, 2012.