Hamid MORADKHANI

University of Alabama

Speaker Biography

Prof. Hamid Moradkhani is the executive Director of the Center for Complex Hydrosystems Research, the Alton N. Scott Chair of Engineering, and Professor of Hydrology and Water Resource at the University of Alabama. Previously, he was the director of Water Resources and Remote Sensing lab and professor of Civil and environmental engineering at Portland State University. His broad research interests are on scientific, pedagogical, and logistical challenges of coupled atmosphere, fresh water, and land systems. The central emphasis of his research is to build capacity to cope with grand challenges in the twenty-first century where the interdependence of critical resources and the imperative for ensuring sustainability is underscored by the Climate-Water-Energy-Food Nexus. He is pioneer in introducing algorithmic and methodological solutions to variety of hydrosystems problems. He has worked extensively at the complex nexus of extreme events, harnessing data revolution, and hydrosystem management. His scholarly agenda is multi-fold and overlaps disciplines including hydrologic and hydrodynamic modeling, development and application of inverse modeling and ensemble data assimilation, uncertainty quantification, physics-informed machine learning, data analytics and high-performance computing.

He is an elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union for “fundamental contributions to data assimilation, understanding, modeling and prediction of hydroclimate extremes key to enabling the societal resiliency”. Also, he is the recipient of several awards including the Horton lecturer award from American Meteorological Society, Arid Lands Hydraulic Engineering award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Outstanding Research and Innovation Award from the American Association of Water Resources Engineers (AAWRE), Branford P. Millar Award, for exceptional scholarship in research, instruction, university and public service. He is a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Environmental and Water Resources Institute, and the board certified of water resources engineering from AAWRE. He has been the Editor of flagship AGU Water Resources Research and Earth’s Future and on the editorial board of several other journals.