Auroop Ratan Ganguly | |
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| Born | Mathura, India |
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| Doctoral advisor | Rafael L. Bras |
Auroop Ratan Ganguly is an American hydrologist, a climate and computational scientist, and a civil engineer of Indian origin best known for his work at the intersection of climate extremes and water sustainability, infrastructural resilience and homeland security, and artificial intelligence and nonlinear dynamics.
Ganguly was born in Mathura, India to Shreemoti Deepali Ganguly (née Bhattacharya) and Shree Nirmal Kumar Ganguly. He completed his primary and secondary schooling from St. Xaviers School, Durgapur, and his higher secondary from Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, Narendrapur (now in Kolkata), both in West Bengal, India. He obtained his Bachelor of Technology in civil engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (1993), a Master of Science in civil engineering from University of Toledo, Ohio (1997), and a PhD from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2002).
Ganguly is a College of Engineering Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University (NU) in Boston, MA, United States, where he has been on the faculty since 2011. He has a joint appointment as a Chief Scientist at the US DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. He is currently a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Director of the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory, [1] one of the two Co-Directors of the Global Resilience Institute (GRI), and a member of the core leadership team of the experiential AI Institute at Northeastern University. He is or has been a Professor by courtesy of multiple departments, schools, centers, institutes, and colleges at NU, specifically, the Khoury College of Computer Science, the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, the D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Marine and Environmental Sciences, and Political Science, as well as in the core leadership team of the Experiential Artificial Intelligence (EAI) Institute, and one of two Co-Directors of the Global Resilience Institute. Ganguly is currently a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar and previously a visiting professor at IIT Kharagpur and IIT Bombay.
Prior to his current position at Northeastern University in Boston, he was at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory for seven years in their Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, at Oracle Corporation for five years in their Time Series Database Kernel and Demand Forecasting E-business groups, and at a startup called Demantra Inc., a demand forecasting company subsequently acquired by Oracle, for a year. In addition, he held joint and visiting faculty positions at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.
Ganguly was a co-founder (with his former PhD student Evan Kodra and another NU alumnus Colin Sullivan) and Chief Scientific Adviser of risQ risQ, a Boston-based climate startup focused on cities, with core capabilities in climate risk assessments for the bond markets and environmental justice. This Northeastern-born startup, a spinout from Ganguly's SDS Lab funded by NSF grants and paying customers (but no VCs), was acquired in January 2022 by the Fortune 500 company Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), whose subsidiaries include the New York Stock Exchange. Currently, Ganguly is an adviser of a startup called Zeus AI, which focuses on AI-based weather forecasting, and was co-founded by his former PhD students Kate Duffy and Thomas Vandal with NASA funding while they were both NASA scientists.
Ganguly is member of United Nations Environmental Program review panel [2] and the lead author of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) section of the 2018 Sustained National Climate Assessment of the United States. [3] He is also a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is currently on the editorial board of Nature's Scientific Reports and PLOS One, a Member of the ASCE Technical Committee on Future Weather and Climate Risks, [4] and the Specialty Chief Editor of the Water and Built Environment section [5] of the journal Frontiers in Water. He was an Associate Editor of the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering. He has previously served as an Associate Editor of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Water Resources Research, on the AI committee of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and as a co-chair of the Societal Dimensions Working Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). [6] Ganguly is the co-founder and chief scientific adviser at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based NSF-funded startup [7] risQ. [8] Auroop has been recognized as 2023 ACM Distinguished Member for his pivotal education, engineering, and scientific contributions. [9]
Ganguly's research across the fields on water and climate science, infrastructures resilience and security, as well as machine learning and nonlinear dynamics. He develops fundamental insights about weather extremes and water sustainability, innovative ways to reduce fragility of infrastructures, and new adaptations of data science. Thus, research teams led by him have been among the first to suggest the possibility of persisting cold snaps under global warming, [10] point to growing spatial variability of extreme rainfall during the Indian monsoon, [11] translate scientific understanding of precipitation extremes under climate change to intensity-duration-frequency curves relevant for the design of hydraulic infrastructures, [12] develop efficient recovery strategies for damaged critical lifeline networks, [13] [14] [15] rigorously compare methods to examine nonlinear relations among short and noisy data, [16] develop hybrid physics and data science methods for weather and climate extremes, [17] and new machine learning [18] [19] [20] and network science methods for representing and projecting complex space-time and graphical data. [21] His research informs governments, companies, communities, and people in the broad area of climate adaptation and resilient engineering for urban sustainability and rural development with an emphasis on becoming resilient to changes and extreme events. [22] [23] [24]
Ganguly's research has been cited in United Nations and US assessment reports, highlighted in commentaries in scientific venues such as Nature, [25] PNAS, NASA Tech Briefs, R&D Magazine, [26] US Department of Energy (DOE), and National Science Foundation (NSF) news, [27] while he and his work have been quoted by global media [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] - including by the New York Times, [35] Newsweek, [36] and the Independent (UK) [37] -in the articles on global warming, weather and hydrological disasters, and infrastructure and rebuilding. The startup he cofounded with his former PhD student has been highlighted by the Wall Street Journal. [38]
The aim of water security is to make the most of water's benefits for humans and ecosystems. The second aim is to limit the risks of destructive impacts of water to an acceptable level. These risks include for example too much water (flood), too little water or poor quality (polluted) water. People who live with a high level of water security always have access to "an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production". For example, access to water, sanitation and hygiene services is one part of water security. Some organizations use the term water security more narrowly for water supply aspects only.
Coastal flooding occurs when dry and low-lying land is submerged (flooded) by seawater. The range of a coastal flooding is a result of the elevation of floodwater that penetrates the inland which is controlled by the topography of the coastal land exposed to flooding. The seawater can flood the land via several different paths: direct flooding, overtopping of a barrier, or breaching of a barrier. Coastal flooding is largely a natural event. Due to the effects of climate change and an increase in the population living in coastal areas, the damage caused by coastal flood events has intensified and more people are being affected.
Climate change in Africa is an increasingly serious threat as Africa is among the most vulnerable continents to the effects of climate change. Some sources even classify Africa as "the most vulnerable continent on Earth". Climate change and climate variability will likely reduce agricultural production, food security and water security. As a result, there will be negative consequences on people's lives and sustainable development in Africa.
Climate resilience is a concept to describe how well people or ecosystems are prepared to bounce back from certain climate hazard events. The formal definition of the term is the "capacity of social, economic and ecosystems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance". For example, climate resilience can be the ability to recover from climate-related shocks such as floods and droughts. Methods of coping include suitable responses to maintain relevant functions of societies and ecosystems. To increase climate resilience means one has to reduce the climate vulnerability of people and countries. Efforts to increase climate resilience include a range of social, economic, technological, and political strategies. They have to be implemented at all scales of society, from local community action all the way to global treaties.
The field of complex networks has emerged as an important area of science to generate novel insights into nature of complex systems The application of network theory to climate science is a young and emerging field. To identify and analyze patterns in global climate, scientists model climate data as complex networks.
The effects of climate change on mental health and wellbeing are documented. This is especially the case for vulnerable populations and those with pre-existing serious mental illness. There are three broad pathways by which these effects can take place: directly, indirectly or via awareness. The direct pathway includes stress-related conditions caused by exposure to extreme weather events. These include post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Scientific studies have linked mental health to several climate-related exposures. These include heat, humidity, rainfall, drought, wildfires and floods. The indirect pathway can be disruption to economic and social activities. An example is when an area of farmland is less able to produce food. The third pathway can be of mere awareness of the climate change threat, even by individuals who are not otherwise affected by it.
Nature-based solutions is the sustainable management and use of natural processes to tackle socio-environmental issues. These issues include for example climate change mitigation and adaptation, water security, and disaster risk reduction. The aim is that resilient ecosystems provide solutions for the benefit of both societies and biodiversity. The 2019 UN Climate Action Summit highlighted nature-based solutions as an effective method to combat climate change. For example, nature-based systems for climate change adaptation can include natural flood management, restoring natural coastal defences, and providing local cooling.
Jessica E. Tierney (born 1982) is an American paleoclimatologist who has worked with geochemical proxies such as marine sediments, mud, and TEX86, to study past climate in East Africa. Her papers have been cited more than 2,500 times; her most cited work is Northern Hemisphere Controls on Tropical Southeast African Climate During the Past 60,000 Years. Tierney is currently a professor of geosciences and the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Integrative Science at the University of Arizona and faculty affiliate in the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment Tierney is the first climatologist to win NSF's Alan T Waterman Award (2022) since its inception in 1975.
Kimberly A. Prather is an American atmospheric chemist. She is a distinguished chair in atmospheric chemistry and a distinguished professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and department of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego. Her work focuses on how humans are influencing the atmosphere and climate. In 2019, she was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for technologies that transformed understanding of aerosols and their impacts on air quality, climate, and human health. In 2020, she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is also an elected Fellow of the American Philosophical Society, American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Holly Michael is an American hydrogeologist and Associate Professor of geology at the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment.
Jalonne White-Newsome is a program officer and lecturer. She is an advocate for environmental justice.
Kimberly A. Novick is an environmental scientist and an Associate professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research mostly includes the study of land-atmosphere interactions. She received the Thomas Hilker Early Career Award in Biogeosciences from American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2019.
Shahzeen Attari is a professor at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington. She studies how and why people make the judgements and decisions they do with regards to resource use and how to motivate climate action. In 2018, Attari was selected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in recognition of her work addressing climate change. She was also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) from 2017 to 2018, and received a Bellagio Writing Fellowship in 2022.
Shafiqul Islam is a Bangladeshi American researcher, academic and author. He is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor of Water Diplomacy at Tufts University. He serves as the Director of Water Diplomacy. He is also the Founding Editor of the Water Diplomacy Series.
James Hall, is Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks and former director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. He is director of research at the School of Geography and the Environment, Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Engineering Science and Fellow of Linacre College. Hall is a member of the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology, commissioner of the National Infrastructure Commission, and is chair of the Science and Advisory Committee of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. He was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2010. He was a member of the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the UK Climate Change Committee from 2009 to 2019. He was appointed as vice-president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 2021 with a view to become president in 2024.
The climate in Texas is changing partially due to global warming and rising trends in greenhouse gas emissions. As of 2016, most area of Texas had already warmed by 1.5 °F (0.83 °C) since the previous century because of greenhouse gas emissions by the United States and other countries. Texas is expected to experience a wide range of environmental impacts from climate change in the United States, including rising sea levels, more frequent extreme weather events, and increasing pressure on water resources.
Paulina Jaramillo is a Colombian-American engineer who is Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She serves as Director of the Green Design Institute. Her research focuses on energy system sustainability and climate change. She was selected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2020.
Jennie C. Stephens is an academic researcher, professor, author, and social justice advocate. She is Professor of Sustainability Science & Policy at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. She is also affiliated with the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the department of Cultures, Societies & Global Studies.
Upmanu Lall is an Indian-American engineer and founding director of the Water Institute at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. Lall also has a faculty appointment as professor in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems within the College of Global Futures. Prior to joining ASU in January 2024, Lall was the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He served as founding director of the Columbia Water Center. Lall studies how to solve water scarcity and how to predict and mitigate floods. In 2014, he was awarded the Henry Darcy Medal by the European Geosciences Union. 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.
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