Xander Huggins joined the Levin Lab in Fall of 2024.  His Ph.D. research, conducted under the supervision of Tom Gleeson (University of Victoria) and James S. Famiglietti (Arizona State University) advanced theory and methods to understand global groundwater systems as social-ecological systems. During his Ph.D., he participated in the Young Scientist Summer Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and there received the Mikhalevich Award.  

His postdoctoral work will be conducted primarily at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and supported through an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship, a UBC Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, and a Canadian Space Agency Postdoctoral award.  He also co-leads an international working group on large-scale freshwater resilience, which convenes semi-annually for the Global Freshwater Systems Science Workshop. 

His postdoctoral interests involve understanding groundwater’s role in mediating or driving regime shifts across social, ecological, and Earth systems. Building on his previous work to globally map groundwater-dependent ecosystems, he will investigate the resilience of these ecosystems worldwide to groundwater storage changes across land use and socioeconomic contexts. More broadly, his work applies complexity science to groundwater as a social-ecological system, drawing on resilience theory and system dynamics to understand critical transitions. He is also interested in characterizing system archetypes, across social, economic, and biophysical systems, to develop bounded theories on social-ecological transitions and how these insights can inform Earth system modeling and sustainability transformations.