Philip Roberts is a Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Roberts works in the areas of hydraulic engineering and environmental fluid mechanics, particularly their applications to the engineering design of water intakes and ocean outfalls for disposal of wastewaters and desalination brine, and density-stratified flows in lakes, estuaries, and coastal waters. This includes mixing and dynamics of natural water bodies, mathematical modeling of water quality, field studies, and laboratory studies of turbulent mixing involving innovative experimental techniques using three-dimensional laser-induced fluorescence. Roberts’ mathematical models and methods have been adopted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and are widely used around the world.

The author of more than 100 articles in leading journals, conference venues, books and book chapters, Roberts received the Collingwood Prize of ASCE, was UPS Foundation Visiting Professor at Stanford University, and was a Distinguished Scholar in the NOAA Oceans and Human Health Initiative. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Registered Professional Engineer

Roberts joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 1978. He holds a BSc (Eng) (1968) from Imperial College, London University; an MS in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and an MS (1972) and Ph.D. (1976) – both in Environmental Engineering Science - from the California Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis was in the area of the hydrodynamics of wastewater mixing from ocean outfalls.