People

Education

• Rutgers University, NJ, Ph.D. Student in Earth & Planetary Sciences
• University of Texas at Austin, TX, M.S. in Geotechnical Engineering, 2017
  • Masters Thesis: "Flow Processes in Unsaturated, Expansive Soils"
• Virginia Tech, VA, B.S. in Civil & Environmental Engineering, 2015

Honors and Awards

• Richard K. Olsson Award for Excellence in Research from Rutgers’ Geoscience, 2020
• Rutgers Graduate Program in Geological Science Excellence Fellowship: Fall 2017 - Spring 2019
• CUASHI 2018 Pathfinder Fellowship
  • Project: "Developing a Whole-Plant Hydraulics Model along Soil-Root-Stem-Leaf-Atmosphere Continuum"

Research Interests

• Vegetation and groundwater: How do soil- and ground-water dynamics drive changes in transpiration, carbon storage, growth, and allocation? What are the physiological limits and environmental drivers of rooting depth and distribution?
• Plant physiological traits: How do plants optimize their efficiencies within the limits of genotypic variation and environmental constraints? How will their strategies adapt to a changing environment? How do (or should) plant traits scale with size? How does plant vasculature (both xylem and phloem, which transport water and sugars, respectively) fit into optimality theories? 
• Water-stress and forest mortality: How do forests respond to meteorological and hydrological droughts? What are the limits to tree size? How does a tree's access to water and its water-use (through both xylem and phloem pathways) control its productivity, size, and vulnerability to mortality? 

Advisor

• Dr. Ying Fan Reinfelder 

Publications

• Potkay, A., ten Veldhuis, M.C., Fan, Y., Mattos, C.R.C., Ananyev, G., Dismukes, G.C. 2019. Water and Vapor Transport in Algal‐Fungal Lichen: Modeling constrained by Laboratory Experiments, an application for Flavoparmelia caperata. Plant, Cell & Environment. 
• Potkay, A. 2017. One-dimensional seepage in unsaturated, expansive soils. Vadose Zone J.
  16(11).
• Zornberg, J.G., Armstrong, C.P., Potkay, A. 2017. Implementation of centrifuge testing of
  expansive soils for pavement design. FHWA/TX-17/5-6048-03-1. Center for Transportation
  Research, UT Austin.

Meetings / Abstracts

• Swenson, S.C., Potkay, A., Fan, Y., Clark, M.P., Lawrence, D.M. 2019. "Implementing Hillslope-scale Hydrology in the Community Terrestrial Systems Model: Do hillslope-scale hydrologic processes affect predictions of global environmental change?" - San Francisco, CA, Fall 2019 AGU Meeting
• Potkay, A., ten Veldhuis, M.C., Fan, Y., Ananyev, G., Dismukes, G. 2018. "Understanding Water and Gas Transport in Algal-Fungal Symbionts: Integrating Laboratory Experiments and Numerical Modeling of Lichens" - Washington D.C., Fall 2018 AGU Meeting