Associate Professor Abbas El-Zein has been working on issues of environmental pollution and protection since the early 1990s. He joined the University of Sydney in 2004.

Abbas is interested in problems of contamination and hydro-mechanical behaviour of saturated and partially-saturated soils, assessment of vulnerability to climate change, as well as the broad links between technology, poverty and environmental degradation in the developing world.

He has supervised a number of Engineers without Borders honours thesis projects on water, sanitation and food security in Cambodia and Nepal.

Anyone interested in addressing environmental problems in the 21st century needs to be prepared to cross disciplinary boundaries every now and then. Abbas's own research, which focuses on environmental geomechanics and environmental risk, draws on the disciplines of computational mathematics, environmental science and engineering, among others.