Upmanu Lall

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]}

Upmanu Lall
Lall speaks at the World Economic Forum in 2013
Alma mater	University of Texas at Austin IIT Kanpur
Scientific career
Institutions	Columbia University
Thesis	Value of data in relation to uncertainty and risk (1981)

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 Doctrate 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 hydrologic 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]

Awards and honors

• 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers Arid Lands Hydrology Award^[11]
• 2014 European Geosciences Union Henry Darcy Medal^[5]
• 2016 American Geophysical Union President of the Natural Hazards Focus Group^[12]
• 2017 American Geophysical Union Fellow^[13]
• 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow^[14]
• 2021 Reuter's Hot List of the World's top 1000 climate scientists:
• 2022 American Geophysical Union Walter Langbein Lecture^[15]
• 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers Ven Te Chow Award^[16]

Selected publications

• Upmanu Lall; Ashish Sharma (March 1996). "A Nearest Neighbor Bootstrap For Resampling Hydrologic Time Series". Water Resources Research. 32 (3): 679–693. doi:10.1029/95WR02966. ISSN 1944-7973. Wikidata Q58092067.
• Moon YI; Balaji Rajagopalan; Upmanu Lall (1 September 1995). "Estimation of mutual information using kernel density estimators". Physical Review E. 52 (3): 2318–2321. Bibcode:1995PhRvE..52.2318M. doi:10.1103/PHYSREVE.52.2318. ISSN 1539-3755. PMID 9963673. Wikidata Q38531494.
• Masahiko Haraguchi; Upmanu Lall (December 2015). "Flood risks and impacts: A case study of Thailand's floods in 2011 and research questions for supply chain decision making". International journal of disaster risk reduction : IJDRR. 14: 256–272. doi:10.1016/J.IJDRR.2014.09.005. ISSN 2212-4209. Wikidata Q58091539.

See also

• Indians in the New York City metropolitan area

References

1. Lall, Upmanu (1981). "Value of data in relation to uncertainty and risk". worldcat.org. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
2. Lall, U. (July 1995). "Recent advances in nonparametric function estimation: Hydrologic applications". Reviews of Geophysics. 33 (S2): 1093–1102. Bibcode:1995RvGeo..33S1093L. doi:10.1029/95RG00343.
3. Lall, Upmanu (June 2014). "Debates-The future of hydrological sciences: A (common) path forward? One water. One world. Many climes. Many souls". Water Resources Research. 50 (6): 5335–5341. Bibcode:2014WRR....50.5335L. doi:10.1002/2014WR015402. S2CID 128556084.
4. "Upmanu Lall". Earth and Environmental Engineering. 2017-08-17. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
5. "Upmanu Lall". European Geosciences Union (EGU). Retrieved 2022-09-10.
6. "America's water infrastructure is failing—but here's how we could start to fix it". Retrieved 2022-09-10.
7. "America's Water: Infrastructure in peril". Circle of Blue. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
8. "This is how cities around the world can avoid a water crisis". World Economic Forum. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
9. Parker, Aubrey Ann (2010-06-04). "Q&A: Upmanu Lall on India's Nexus of Energy, Food and Water". Circle of Blue. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
10. "Professor Upmanu Lall - Editorial Board - Water Security - Journal - Elsevier". www.journals.elsevier.com. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
11. "Arid Lands Hydraulic Engineering Award Past Award Winners". www.asce.org. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
12. "AGU - American Geophysical Union". www.agu.org. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
13. "Upmanu Lall Recognized as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union". State of the Planet. 2017-12-19. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
14. "2018 AAAS Fellows approved by the AAAS Council". Science. 362 (6418): 1010–1013. 2018-11-30. Bibcode:2018Sci...362.1010.. doi:10.1126/science.362.6418.1010. ISSN 0036-8075. S2CID 21866227.
15. Ishii, Faith (2022-09-06). "2022 AGU Section Awardees and Named Lecturers". Eos. Retrieved 2022-09-10.
16. "Ven Te Chow Award Past Award Winners". www.asce.org. Retrieved 2023-01-16.