cole
Cole Speed
Ph.D Candidate and Graduate Researcher
Bureau of Economic Geology / Department of Geological Sciences
Jackson School of Geosciences
University of Texas at Austin
2275 Speedway, C9000, Austin, TX
EPS 3.102C
cole.speed@beg.utexas.edu

ABOUT

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin and a Graduate Research Assistant in the Quantitative Clastics Laboratory (QCL) at the Bureau of Economic Geology.

My Ph.D. research leverages a variety of remote sensing and field datasets to quantify linkages between processes controlling the morphologic and topographic evolution of landscapes and the expression of these processes in the sedimentary record. The bulk of my work has focused on these relationships in modern and ancient fluvial environments, through the integration of lidar and structure-from-motion derived 3-D point cloud data, time-lapse satellite imagery, numerical models, and field measurements. By combining these methods, my goal is to develop useful predictive models of both the evolution of landscapes and the distribution of sediments and pore space within the subsurface that can be applied to problems in infrastructure planning and management, energy exploration / carbon sequestration, and reconstructions of past planetary surface conditions. Throughout the last several years, I've worked to develop Python-based workflows for processing, analyzing, and visualizing geospatial datasets for my own use and that of the broader scientific community, and I've recentely started exploring image segmentation and classification approaches for the automated identification of landforms from high resolution satellite imagery with plans of further developing and applying these methods in my academic and professional career.