Dr Xilin Xia PhD, FHEA, Turing Fellow

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2020
• PhD in Water Resources, Newcastle University, 2017
• MEng in Road and Railway Engineering, Wuhan University, 2012
• BEng in Civil Engineering, Wuhan University, 2010

Dr Xia obtained his BEng in Civil Engineering and MEng in Road and Railway Engineering from Wuhan University, China, in 2010 and 2012, respectively.

In 2017, he was awarded a PhD by Newcastle University for his research on numerical modelling of rainfall-related hazards, including flash flooding and landslides. Following his PhD, he worked as a Research Associate at Newcastle University on flood forecasting and flood risk assessment within the major NERC-funded programme Flooding from Intense Rainfall.

In 2018, he took up his first lectureship at Loughborough University, where he developed an impact-based flood forecasting system for India in partnership with the Met Office, UKCEH, HSE, and the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences.

Since May 2022, Dr Xia has been with the University of Birmingham, where he works on a wide range of problems related to the resilience of infrastructure systems. He has received multiple grants to support research on climate risk assessment and adaptation. Since 2024, he has served as the International Lead for the School of Engineering, overseeing the School’s international engagement activities.

Throughout his career, Dr Xia has made several notable contributions to the computational modelling of natural hazards. He is a pioneer in applying GPU-based high-performance computing for modelling floods and landslides and leads the development of the open-source code SynxFlow, now recognised as a leading open-source multi-hazard modelling software. His work on flood modelling underpins high-profile applications such as the National Digital Twin Programme’s Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDO) and supports industrial applications across multinational companies and small businesses.

His contributions to the field have been recognised by multiple awards and honours, including a Turing Fellowship, the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water, and the University of Birmingham Outstanding Impact Award.

Dr Xia teaches the following topics at the University of Birmingham:

• Surface and Groundwater Hydrology
• Water Transmission and Treatment
• Integrated Design Projects 2

Dr Xia is interested in supervising postgraduate research projects in the broad area of modelling climate and weather-related risks, such as:

• Numerical simulation of rainfall-related hazards, such as flooding, landslides, and debris flows
• Computation methods for fluid dynamics and solid-fluid interactions
• High-performance computing techniques for environmental modelling
• Applications of machine learning for resilience problems
• Big-data analytics for hazard risk management and resilience
• Modelling impacts of extreme weather events on infrastructure system.

He welcomes inquiries from prospective researchers about project ideas and opportunities.

Mitigating and adapting to climate change has become one of the most important societal challenges today. We are seeing increasingly more extreme weather such as heavy rainfall events in the globe including the UK. Such events may cause hazards such as flooding, landslides, debris and failure of earthworks and structures. Our group has been focusing on modelling these hazards to manage the risk and increase resilience, which is very important for users such as infrastructure operators and (re)insurance firms. Our current research interests include:

Robust computational methods for water-related natural hazards

Robust computational methods are underpinning applications such as early warning and risk analytics, which are essential for climate resilience. We are developing accurate, fast, and stable computational methods for flood inundation, landslide runout, fluvial sediment transport and debris flows. A key challenge we are addressing is numerically modelling interacting physical processes across different scales. We have been working a range of methods such as finite volume method, smoothed particle hydrodynamics and material point method.

High-performance computing for environmental modelling

Modern parallel computing based on GPUs creates a paradigm shift for scientific computing. We have been pioneering the application of GPU-based parallel computing for environmental modelling, such as flood inundation modelling. Our work has enabled very large-scale (city and major river catchment) and very high-resolution (meters) simulations.

Applications of AI and machine learning for resilience

AI and Machine learning shows great potential to solve some long-standing problems, such as understanding complex human-nature systems. We are interested in applying and developing a wide range of AI methods such as deep learning, hybrid models, foundation models and generative AI.

Risk-based flood forecasting

It is important to know ‘what does flood do’ rather than just ‘where is the flood’. This is what risk-based flood forecasting is about. We are coupling our flood inundation models with broad-scale hydrological models and receptor data (population, infrastructure, agriculture, etc.) to build risk-based flood forecasting system over large geographical areas such as India.

Risk and resilience of infrastructure

Our research focuses on quantifying how extreme events affect the performance and reliability of critical infrastructure such as transport networks and energy systems. By integrating climate projections, physics-based models, and data-driven analytics, we assess vulnerabilities, estimate cascading impacts, and identify effective adaptation strategies.

Current and recent research projects

• 2024 – 2026, WM-Adapt: Maximising Adaptation to Climate Change in the West Midlands, and beyond, NERC, Co-I,(UoB value: £1,366,598)
• 2023 – 2025, Strategies and Tools for Resilience of Buried Infrastructure to Meteorological Shocks (STORMS), STFC, PI (Total value: £421,453, UoB value: £226,541)
• 2023 – 2023, Deep machine learning to advance understanding of rainfall-runoff processes and numerical hydrological models: leveraging engineering, computer science and environmental perspectives, NERC, PI £8549
• 2023 – 2025, High-performance Integrated Hydrodynamic Modelling Framework For Hydrogeological Hazard Chains In High Mountain Areas, The Royal Society, PI £12000, IECNSFC223218
• 2023 – 2025, Quantum Sensing – Ground and Aquifer Monitoring for Environmental Sciences (QS-GAMES), EPSRC, Co-I, £608,632, EP/X036472/1
• 2022 – 2023, Building a Flood Hazard Impact Model for India (FHIM-India) Phase 3, Newton Fund through UK Met Office, PI (UoB), £19563, P109479
• 2021 – 2022, ENACT: Evaluating the feasibility and efficacy of integrated catchment-scale Nature-based solutions for Climate Change adaptaTion in India, NERC, Co-I £90000
• 2021 – 2022, Building a Flood Hazard Impact Model for India (FHIM-India) Phase 2, Newton Fund through UK Met Office, PI (LU), £18196, P109479
• 2020 – 2022, Beyond the networked city: building innovative delivery systems for water, sanitation and energy in urban Africa, ESRC, Co-I £355330, ES/T007656/1
• 2019 – 2021, Building a Flood Hazard Impact Model for India (FHIM-India), Newton Fund through UK Met Office, PI (LU) £185000, P106860
• 2018 – 2019, Newton Fund Research Link Workshop Grant: Hydro-geohazards and Resilient Urban Growth, British Council, Co-I £24000, 2018-RLWK10-10625
• 2019 – 2020, FUTURE-DRAINAGE: Ensemble climate change rainfall estimates for sustainable drainage, NERC, Co-I £110000, NE/S016678/1
• 2019 – 2021, River basins as ‘living laboratories’ for achieving sustainable development goals across national and sub-national scales, NERC, Co-I £160000, NE/S012427/1

Software

 We develop and maintain the following software for modelling rainfall-related hazards:

SynxFlow

This software can dynamically simulate flood inundation, landslides runout and debris flows using multiple CUDA-enabled GPUs. It also offers a user-friendly yet versatile Python interface that can be fully integrated into data science workflows, aiming to streamline and accelerate hazard risk assessment tasks.

• 2025 – present, Associate Editor of Journal of Hydrology and Journal of Flood Risk Management
• 2024 – present, Member of EPSRC Peer Review College
• 2022, Special Session Organiser, The 39th IAHR World Congress
• 2022 – present, Reviewer Editor, Frontiers in Water
• 2020, Editor, Special issue on shallow water flow modelling in Advances in Water Resources
• 2018, Convenor, The 13th International Hydroinformatics Conference (HIC)
• 2017 – present, Editor, Geoenvironmental Disaster
• 2017, Session Chair, The 37th IAHR World Congress
• 2017, Session Chair, The 15th International Symposium on Geo-disaster Reduction
• 2016 – present, Invited Reviewer
  Journal of Hydraulic Research’, ‘Advances in Water Resources’, ‘Journal of Hydrology’, ‘ICE – Water Management’, ‘Water Science and Engineering’, ‘Journal of Hydroinformatics’, ‘Journal of Hydrodynamics’, ‘Computational Methods and Applications in Mechanics and Engineering’, ‘Science of Total Environment’, ‘Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology’, ‘Water Resources Research’, ‘Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface’, ‘Ocean Engineering’, ‘Computers and Geosciences’, ‘Natural Hazards’.
• 2015 – present, Invited seminar speaker
  Imperial College, Cambridge University, University of Sao Paolo, Hohai University, Sun Yat-Sen University, Wuhan University, Technical University of Berlin, University of Edinburgh, State University of Campinas