American Earth Scientist
Upmanu Lall is an Indian-American engineer and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He serves as Director of the Columbia Water Center. Lall studies water scarcity and how to predict and mitigate floods. He was named an American Geophysical Union Fellow in 2017 and their Walter Langbein Lecturer in 2022. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018, and has received the Arid Lands Hydrology and the Ven Te Chow Awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers. In April 2021 he was named to the “Hot List of the world’s 1,000 top climate scientists” by Reuters.[citation needed]
Early life and education
Lall was born in 1956 in Dharamsala, Himanchal Pradesh, India. He studied Civil Engineering at IIT Kanpur, and graduated in 1976. He earned his Masters and Doctorate in Civil & Environmental Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1981. His doctoral research considered the value of data in uncertainty and risk.[1] Lall was trained in hydrology and water resources, but recognized the importance of hydrologic systems analysis, statistics and climate dynamics. In the 1990s he got interested in climate change, nonlinear dynamics and applied functional analysis.[citation needed] These interests led to significant contributions in nonparametric function estimation,[2] and hydroclimatic predictability.[3]
Research and career
Lall works on hydrology and climate dynamics. He serves as the Director of the Columbia Water Center, where he looks at water scarcity, hydroclimatic extremes, infrastructure issues and risk. Lall developed a Global Flood Initiative, which looks to predict, manage and control floods from a global climate dynamics perspective, and a Global Water Sustainability Initiative, which concentrates on water scarcity and risks.[4] He was one of the first to identify the significance of climate teleconnections (climate anomalies that are related to one another over long distances) in terrestrial hydrology.[5] Lall's current work focuses on a research program called the America's Water initiative, which seeks to develop sustainable water management protocols, and strengthen resilience to the changing climate.[6][7]
Lall has been involved in policy making and science communication, including providing insight at the World Economic Forum.[8][9] He initiated the establishment of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal Water Security.[10]
