His research is in surface water hydrology, focusing on computational modeling of watershed scale hydrologic and river processes. Recent projects include quantifying uncertainty in hydrologic and hydraulic models for flood modeling, development and use of cyberinfrastructure for sharing of hydrologic data and models, development of GIS techniques for river modeling, and incorporating soil moisture data for improving hydrologic predictions. Merwade has a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.