Our Team
Describe your team here.
Yunus Kovankaya is a third year Civil Engineering Major, concentrating in Water Resources and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University. He is currently developing a general optimization model that can identify effective, low-cost decentralized networks for wastewater treatment for any community within the United States. Outside of the Water Center, he works on increasing accessibility to potable water in remote rural areas as a water team lead for Columbia University’s Engineers Without Borders Ghana chapter. In the past, he has presented research on identifying areas vulnerable to power outages during hurricanes at the Transportation Research Board Conference and co-authored a paper on classifying Turkish Makam music using topological data analysis.
Research Areas: Water systems in rural areas, optimizing recovery from natural disasters, and decentralized wastewater treatment.
Yuhan is a master's student at Columbia Water Center, the Earth and Environmental Engineering Department, and concentrates on Water Resources and Climate Risks. She is interested in modeling forecasts of climate change's impact on the hydrology system, especially hydroclimatic extremes. Now she is working on machine learning models of the Contiguous United States’ dam operation rule and working on the extreme precipitation trend analysis of the Contiguous United States.
Research interests: environmental data analysis, machine learning, hydroclimatic model
Research Areas: Renewable Energy and Climate Variability, Robust Energy Systems, Extreme Streamflow Event Analysis, Smart Energy Contracts, Mining and Water Security
CWC Projects: SERDP, America's Water Initiative, NBIM.
Research Areas: Energy sources and conversion; heat/mass transfer; fluid mechanics; energy infrastructure; CO2 sequestration; fuel cells; distributed sensing/control of flow; heat transfer.
Dr. Upmanu Lall is the Director of the Columbia Water Center and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He is a world-renowned expert in statistical and numerical modeling of hydrologic and climatic systems and water resource systems planning and management. He has pioneered statistical methods and their application to the prediction of hydrologic and climate conditions, and advanced tools for decision analysis and risk management.
Research Areas: Hydroclimatology, nonlinear dynamics, and applied statistics; Natural hazards, water systems, and risk management; Water technologies for developing countries.
Specialist In: Water and climate; Floods; Water Scarcity and Risks; Droughts; Water in the Western US; Water and agriculture in India; Climate prediction and water management in Brazil, Water issues in Asia; Groundwater Depletion.
I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science and Mathematics, Sultan Idris Education University (UPSI), Malaysia. Concisely, I had obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Mathematics from University of Technology Malaysia (UTM), Malaysia in 2010, and completed my Doctor of Philosophy in Statistics from the same university in 2017. My research interests are in dimensions reduction methods applied to climate informatics, which analyzes huge climate-related datasets using Data Mining techniques. Additionally, I am focusing my current research on the development of a prediction model for hydrological, environmental, microbiological and educational data. The majority of the research is using historical data and deals with high dimensional data. My approach to solving the problems in the study involves the use of multivariate analysis approaches combined with time series methods and machine learning techniques. I have a wide range of experience in multivariate analysis such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Factor Analysis (FA), for time series analysis I use Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA), and for machine learning techniques I specialize in Support Vector Machine (SVM), Relevant Vector Machine (RVM) and Random Forest. As a statistician with a view towards data science, I believe that the skills I have acquired throughout my research experience would be a valuable asset to the research committee.
Research Area: Multivariate Analysis, Applied Hydrological Modelling, Applied Statistics, Machine Learning
Specialist In: Water and Climate Modelling
Dr. Marquez holds a Ph.D. in environmental health sciences and engineering from the University of North Carolina, Gillings School of Global Public Health; a M.Eng. in civil engineering from Texas A&M University; and a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Prairie View A&M University.
Research Areas: increasing access to water and sanitation in underserved communities; WASH-related burden of disease; gender equality and access to water; water, energy, and food security nexus; empowering women and girls through transformative WASH.
Dr. Scott Steinschneider is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. His primary expertise is in statistical hydroclimatology, with two principal focus areas: (1) the characterization of hydroclimatic variability across space-time scales, and (2) the analysis of hydroclimate impacts in the water sector. His work has focused on water systems across the United States and globally and has been sponsored by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NOAA, Department of the Interior, National Science Foundation, US Department of Agriculture, and New York Sea Grant. He earned his BA in Mathematics from Tufts University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Prior to arriving at Cornell, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University.
Research Areas: hydroclimatic variability and change; water resources planning and management; uncertainty and risk analysis; decision-making under uncertainty.
Sara Schwetschenau is a post-doctoral research scientist at the Columbia Water Center. She completed her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in the department of Engineering in Public Policy. Her research focuses on long-term infrastructure planning for water infrastructure using optimization and statistical modeling techniques. Prior to completing her doctorate, she worked as an environmental engineer, involved in the planning, design, and evaluation of wastewater infrastructure and advanced treatment plants in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
Research areas: multi-objective optimization, applied statistics, and risk analysis; Drinking water and wastewater systems, decision-making under uncertainty and policy analysis.
Specialist in: Water and wastewater treatment and distribution systems; drinking water contaminant risk assessment.
Qin is pursuing a Master's degree in Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University with a concentration in Water Resources and Climate Risks. She works with Dr. Laureline Josset on TAP project in Professor Upmanu Lall’s group, helping with data collection, aggregation, analysis, visualization, and reporting of lead levels in NYS schools and other potential contaminants. Her research interests are climate extremes and natural disasters using machine learning and data analysis methods. Prior to coming to Columbia, Qin finished her B.S. in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Barbara with a minor in Japanese.
Pierre Gentine obtained his MSc (2006) and PhD (2009) at MIT, both in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Research Areas: Land-atmosphere interactions; Hydrometeorology and remote sensing; Ecohydrology; Soil moisture.
Specialist in: Water for agriculture and crops (yield, irrigation, growth); Measurements of soil moisture; Floods and Droughts; Remote sensing (soil moisture)
Nicole van Maanen is a PhD candidate at the Humboldt University of Berlin and works as a Research Analyst at Climate Analytics. She was a visiting researcher at the Columbia Water Center in 2023 with Prof. Upmanu Lall. Her research focuses on improving climate impact assessments by developing scenarios for sectoral adaptive capacity to climate change, among others, for coastal flood protection. Nicole holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Potsdam and a M.Sc. in Climate Studies from Wageningen University & Research.
Research areas: adaptation, adaptive capacity, climate change impacts, risk assessments, sustainable development, scenario development, climate litigation, labour productivity
Research Areas: Advanced membrane processes for water purification and production; Novel technologies for sustainable power generation; Environmental issues at the water-energy nexus.
Dr. Naresh Devineni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering in The City University of New York’s City College. He holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from North Carolina State University. He did his post-doctoral studies at Columbia University. He also worked as a Consultant for the World Bank for a brief period in 2009. He is also the creator of a data science blog www.dataanalysisclassroom.com where people of all backgrounds and ages can learn data analysis, probability, and statistics in a fun and intuitive way without the technical lingo. Naresh's research is motivated by challenging problems interfacing human needs, engineering innovation and scientific advancement.
Research Areas: hydro-climate modeling and extremes analysis, statistical methods, water sustainability and risk assessment and water systems analysis.
Moyan Liu is a graduate student in Earth and Environmental Engineering major, concentrating in Water Resources and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University. He is now working to apply machine learning methods on electricity price prediction and build a financial instrument to respond to the extreme conditions.
Research Areas:
Water Resources and Climate Risks, Energy System and Market, Machine Learning & Data AnalysisDr. Mengling Qiao is currently an associate research scientist in the Columbia Water Center, Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow in The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She obtained her Ph.D. in The State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS) in Wuhan University. Her research interests include Disaster Planning, Human Mobility, Urban Geography, GeoHealth, and Computational Social Science. Currently, she is currently focusing on modeling the mobility patterns of human mobility in disaster events, and sensing the sentiment changes of general population in the post-pandemic era.
Key publications:
- Assessment of community vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic：Hong Kong as a case study. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2022.103007 Mengling Qiao, Bo Huang.
- A realistic and multilevel measurement of citywide spatial patterns of economic segregation based on human activities. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.103067 Mengling Qiao, Yandong Wang, Shanmei Wu, Xiaokang Fu, Yanyan Gu, Mingxuan Dou
Mengjie is investigating the impacts of climate change. Specifically, she is interested in sub-seasonal precipitation forecast and the associated impacts on water resources and society.
Research Areas: Climate change, Hydrometeorology, Water Resources and Economics.
Maura Allaire is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on developing solutions to environmental challenges through integrated understanding of economic and natural systems. Specific areas of interest include the development of resilience strategies for extreme flood events, disparities in nationwide water quality, and decision support for water resource management. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Her professional experience spans the public and private sectors, including international organizations (World Bank, Global Development Network), think tanks (Resources for the Future, International Water Management Institute), and environmental consulting (AMEC).
Research areas: Water economics; environmental equity; econometrics; cost-benefit analysis; flood risk mitigation; urban water systems
CWC project: "Addressing the Gap in Reliable, Affordable Wastewater Services to Protect Public Health in the United States"
Luc Bonnafous worked at the CWC between 2014 and 2019, focusing on water issues in the mining industry and climate extreme events. He has also worked in the private sector and at the World Bank as a Disaster Risk Management specialist.
Research interests: Hydroclimatology, extreme events, risk management, water in mining, fisheries
Leiming Chen is pursuing the Earth and environmental engineering program at Columbia for his master. at the Columbia Water Center. He is currently focusing on the impacts of extreme tropical cyclones using Machine Learning.
Research interests: Climate Risk, Data analysis & Machine learning, Energy optimization, Water engineering
Lei Yan is a post-doctoral research scientist at the Columbia Water Center. He completed his Ph.D. at Wuhan University in the department of Hydrology and Water Resources, focusing on the impacts of climate change and human activities on hydrometeorological extremes using statistical techniques. Currently, His primary research interest is the modeling and prediction of ENSO events using machine learning methods and its teleconnection with precipitation, renewable resources and other hydrometeorological extremes.
Research Areas:
Forecasting of renewable resources; ENSO prediction and teleconnection; Urban extreme precipitation; Urban flood risk analysis; Hydrological frequency analysisLeah Jones-Crank is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Earth Institute. Her research explores the collaborative governance within the food-energy-water nexus for improved management, governance, and decision-making of the integrated resource system. Using stakeholder engagement, social network analysis, and qualitative analysis, she has explored water governance and the food-energy-water nexus in the US and South Africa. Before joining Columbia, she completed a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from the University of Virginia and her master’s and Ph.D. in Sustainability from Arizona State University.
Research areas: urban water systems; water resource management; collaborative governance; food-energy-water nexus; stakeholder engagement; qualitative data collection and analysis
Larisa Tarasova is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department Catchment Hydrology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ in Halle, Germany. Her research focuses on understanding of drivers and generation processes of hydrological events at large scales. By providing more process-based insights to the fields of the statistical flood frequency analysis and flood forecasting, she strives to develop tools for more robust flood hazard estimation in a changing world. Dr. Larisa Tarasova was a visiting Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University. She has completed her PhD in Hydrology at Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany and her M.Sc. in Water Resources and Environmental Management at the Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany.
Research Areas: large scale analysis of hydrological events; causative classification of flood events; hydroclimatology of floods; flood generation processes; catchment characterization
Dr. Wurthmann is a Professor of Management at the H. Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His teaching and research focus on strategic management, with an emphasis on strategic analysis, strategy formulation and ESG issues. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Wurthmann worked for more than a decade as an engineer. He earned his B.S. and M.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University, MBA from the Yale School of Management, and M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Ph.D. in Business from Columbia University.
Research Areas: strategic management; corporate governance; business ethics; perceptions and decision making; systems and sustainable engineering; decentralized water and energy systems; relationships between organizations and the natural environment
Dr. Katherine Alfredo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida. Dr. Alfredo has extensive international experience that includes two US Fulbright Fellowships. Her first Fulbright was awarded in 2008 (U.S. Student Fulbright Fellowship) to research cultural complications involved in rural, water treatment and management in the Northeast region of Ghana, West Africa. Her second Fulbright was awarded in 2015 (Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Scholar) to investigate how and why rurally-implemented drinking water treatment plants both succeed and fail when their management is transferred to the community. This line of inquiry began during her tenure as a Columbia University Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia Water Center and continues to explore today. Prior to joining the faculty at USF, she was the Research Program Manager at DC Water focused on the difficulties large, urban utilities face in ensuring a constant supply of high quality, potable water. She holds a Professional Engineering license in the state of Virginia.
Research Areas: Water utility rates (continued collaboration with CWC), sustainability metrics and evaluations, physical-chemical water treatment processes, drinking water regulatory enforcement policy, rural and resource limited water treatment, utility/water trust, urban water distribution concerns, point-of- use water treatment technologies.
Specialist in: urban drinking water treatment and management, rural water treatment and management, drinking water policy, US drinking water regulations, potable water sustainability concerns.Dr. Jeongwoo Hwang is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University. His research primarily focuses on understanding and predicting hydrometeorological extremes and their impacts on water systems, combining the science of hydroclimatology with water management and data science.
Dr. Hwang received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from The City University of New York - City College. Prior to joining North Carolina State University, he worked as a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University.
Research Areas: Hydroclimate modeling and extremes analysis, water balance modeling, statistical and deep learning methods, water sustainability and risk assessment, water systems analysis
James Rising is an interdisciplinary modeller at the School of Marine Science & Policy at the University of Delaware. His research focuses on the impacts of climate change and the interaction between human decisions and the environment. Prior to joining UD, James held postdoctoral positions at the Energy & Resources Group at UC Berkeley and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, and he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University’s program in Sustainable Development.
Research areas:
Climate change impacts, integrated modelling; water-energy-food nexus, complexity, climate justiceJames Doss-Gollin is an assistant professor in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. Dr. Doss-Gollin’s research is motivated by challenging questions at the intersection of climate dynamics, water management, data science, and decision science. By developing methods for understanding and predicting spatiotemporally clustered hydroclimate risk, and for incorporating uncertain projections into sequential decision problems, he strives to enable the delivery of adaptive and resilient infrastructure services. Dr. Doss-Gollin completed his Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia and holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Yale University. Prior to joining Rice University, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at the Pennsylvania State University.
Research areas: flood risk management, climate adaptation and change, resilient infrastructure, optimization and reinforcement learning, statistical modeling, urban water systems.
Beth Tellman is a human-environment geographer whose research addresses the causes and consequences of global environmental change in vulnerable populations, with a focus on access to water, flood risk, and land use change. She engages in a wide array of disciplines and methods from land system science, to hydrology, to the social sciences. She is a co-founder of Cloud to Street: https://cloudtostreet.info/, a public benefit corporation that leverages remote sensing data to build flood monitoring and mapping systems for low- and middle-income countries. Beth will be an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Arizona in August 2021. To learn more about her publications, projects, and PhD and post doc opportunities see: https://beth-tellman.github.io/.
Research Areas: Remote sensing, flooding, land use change, urbanization, vulnerability, illicit activity
Current projects with the CWC:
NASA Commercial SmallSat Data Analysis. 2021-22. PI Beth Tellman with collaborators Iskha Gurung, Andrew Molthan (NASA) and Upmanu Lall. High resolution imagery to train and validate deep learning models of inundation extent for multiple satellite sensors.
NASA New Early Career Investigators Program Earth Sciences. 2021-2024. PI Beth Tellman with Collaborators Upmanu Lall, Saiful Islam, Mohammed Bhuyan, Mehadi Hasan, and Sarder Raihan. Understanding flood risk in human altered landscapes from cities to farms: inferences from satellites and machine learning.
NASA Terrestrial Hydrology. 2021-2024. PI Beth Tellman with Co-Is Upmanu Lall, Pierre Gentine, and Venkat Lakshmi. Mapping flood impacts using multi-sensor satellite data fusion in urban areas.
Eliza Cohn (jointly supervised by Bolun Xu and Upmanu Lall) is interested in renewable energy, the power grid, water systems, and methods to design equitable management strategies for the water-energy nexus in the face of climate change. She received her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 2020.
Prof. Bolun Xu's group: https://bolunxu.github.io/group/
David Farnham is a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Science and the Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University working with Dr. Ken Caldeira. David is an engineer and applied scientist who investigates climate risk to critical water and energy infrastructure. David holds a PhD from the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University where he studied under the advisement of Dr. Upmanu Lall.
David combines earth science, data science, and systems analysis to
(1) identify vulnerabilities of our water and energy infrastructure to climate variability and climate change,
(2) quantify climate hazards to these critical infrastructure systems, and
(3) conduct research that supports efforts to design and operate adaptive and resilient engineered water and energy systems that limit exposure to climate risks and make use of the opportunities presented by nature.Claire Palandri is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Harris School of Public Policy. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University’s program in Sustainable Development, which cultivates an interdisciplinary approach to address the challenges of socio-ecological systems.
Her research focuses on bringing together the insights and methodological strengths of multiple disciplines to address such questions, and notably to study the animal farming system. She is deeply interested in the relation between humans and domesticated animals, and its position in the socio-ecological transition. Her research relates to 2 areas: (i) The diverse forms of animal farming, from artisanal to industrial, and the tradeoffs they entail; (ii) Bridging differences between the statistical methods of disciplines whose collaboration is needed for such interdisciplinary questions.
Prior to the University of Chicago and Columbia University, she earned her M.Sc. in Environmental Economics and B.Sc. in Environmental Science from AgroParisTech (France).
Carolyn Hayek is a student in the PhD program in Sustainable Development. She holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Boston College with a minor in environmental studies, as well as a Masters in Environmental Engineering and a Masters in Urban Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to joining the Columbia community, Carolyn spent 10 years at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) New England regional office in Boston, MA. While there, she was selected for a highly competitive 2-year developmental program designed to expose employees to the full breadth and scope of the Agency. Areas in which Carolyn has worked include: effective management of drinking water and wastewater utilities, grants management and federal oversight of Drinking Water State Revolving Fund programs, water quality sampling, compliance assistance and enforcement for chemical storage and usage, hazardous waste site cleanup, green chemistry, wetlands permitting, low impact development, climate change, and the Significant New Alternatives Policy Program for ozone-depleting substances.
Research Areas:
Sustainable Water Infrastructure; Comprehensive Measures of Water-Sector Utility Performance; Availability and Aggregation of Utility-Level Data; Socio-Technical Transitions towards Water Reuse.Specialist In:
US Water-Sector Challenges; US Water Utilities; Decentralized Water Reuse; State Revolving Fund (SRF) Programs; Environmental Planning and Community Right to Know (EPCRA); Stakeholder Engagement; the Interface of Natural and Built Environments.Candace Agonafir has a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the City College of New York, a M.S. in Industrial Engineering from NYU, and a B.S. in Physical Science with a concentration in Physics and a minor in Catholic Theology from St. John’s University. Her past research involved utilizing regression and machine learning methodologies to provide invaluable information towards advancements in urban flooding detection, prediction and prevention. Ultimately, by the continuous adoption of improved and contemporary machine learning techniques, she aims to become an established, impactful, and consistent contributor within the field of civil engineering water resources via Artificial Intelligence.
Bihu Suchetana is a Visiting Associate Research Scientist at the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University and an Assistant Professor (on sabbatical) at the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India. She holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder, a Master’s in Water Resources and Environmental Engineering from Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India and a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Indian Institute of Engineering, Science and Technology, Shibpur, India. Her research explores the use of machine learning algorithms and optimization tools to understand decentralized treatment systems and their environmental impacts. She also has experience modelling wastewater treatment plant behaviour under changing regulatory and climatic regimes.
Key publications:
Research interests: water resource management, risk assessment, mining sector, science and technology policy
Adam is interested in research at the intersection of machine learning and climate adaptation. With specific interests in socio-environmental models and climate risk, Adam aims to investigate sustainable and equitable solutions for hydroclimate resilience. Adam received their BS and MS from Stanford University in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Management Science and Engineering respectively.