Jorg Imberger

Jörg Imberger is the Director of the Centre for Water Research and Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Western Australia (UWA), where he is a Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow. Imberger received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970 and became Professor of Environmental Engineering at UWA in 1979.

Imberger is an internationally recognized and respected environmental engineer and is considered a landmark in his field of research, with the most respectful commentators talk about ‘before and after Imberger’. Imberger has been awarded a range of international and national prizes. Internationally, he has received the Onassis Prize for the Environment and the Stockholm Water Prize. Nationally, Imberger received the Clunies Ross National Science and Technology Award and the Peter Nicol Russell Memorial Medal. In 2006, he received ASLO's A.C. Redfield Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a Fellow into US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, UK.

His research interests include the motion and mixing in lakes, estuaries and coastal seas in response to both natural forces such as tides, meterological surface fluxes, river inflows and outflows as well as anthrogoneic forcings such as effluent buoyant jets, bubble plumes and mechanical mixers and the effect of such motions and mixing on ecological systems residing in the water bodies. He is also interested in the dependence of aquatic ecological systems on transport and mixing processes and the application of this combined knowledge to the sustainable management of such water bodies.

In the course of his research, Imberger has also developed, in collaboration with industry, a wide range of sophisticated instruments. They have been vital to his research aims, which have proved to be the mother of invention. These include the Lake Diagnostic System (LDS), the Portable Flux Profiler (PFP) and the Fine Scale Profiler (F-Probe).