Dr. Michael Tso

Michael Tso is an environmental data scientist at UKCEH.

Michael serves as a SCRUM co-product owner for DataLabs to drive its development as a digital research infrastructure (DRI) that supports collaborative and open science.

His current research focus on advancing and demonstrating the use and capability of data science methods for a wide range of environmental applications and create a step change in environmental research. This includes the application of novel machine learning and statistical methods, fostering open research, improving research narratives using notebook technology, data quality control, promoting the use of virtual labs, and increasing research impact via web apps. He is particularly interested developing new data science capabilities for environmental monitoring and modelling. For example, he is currently leading work packages on adaptive sampling for high-frequency 'lab-on-a-chip' sensors, and integration of disparate environmental datasets. 

While working across all domains of geo-environmental science, Michael currently spend most of his time working on soil moisture, water quality and chemical pollution. Michael's work seek to understand the drivers for pollution in freshwater environments and in the subsurface, as well as the drying and wetting behaviour in soils over different temporal and spatial scales.

This all build his MS and PhD research work on enhancing the information content of pumping test and geophysical data for site characterisation (often in a contaminated site context).

Michael has a background in hydrology and near-surface geophysics. His PhD focused on coupled hydrogeophysical modeling and monitoring, electrical methods such as electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), data assimilation, inversion and imaging, and uncertainty quantification. He remains active in these research areas.

Please consult his personal researcher site for more information: https://cmtso.github.io/. Michael welcomes enquiries to co-develop research proposals (e.g. UKRI grants, PhD studentships, government agency contracts). 

Michael is affiliated with Centre of Excellence for Environmental Data Science (profile) and Lancaster Environment Centre (profile). He is a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute.