Upmanu Lall is the director of the Water Institute at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. He is also a 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 and served as Director of the Columbia Water Center. He developed and led a Global Water Sustainability Initiative, a Global Flood Initiative, and the America’s Water Initiative. In addition to contributing to hydrology, climate dynamics, statistics and machine learning, and risk/insurance analysis, he has worked with colleagues, development banks, governments and the private sector to implement financial, technical and policy solutions for water and climate challenges from village to country scale on all major continents. 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. He received the Henry Darcy Medal from the European Geophysical Union. In April 2021 he and 2 of his former students (Professors Balaji Rajagopalan, University of Colorado, Boulder; and Ashish Sharma, University of New South Wales, Australia) were named to the “Hot List of the world’s 1,000 top climate scientists” by Reuters.
Honors and Awards:
- 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers Arid Lands Hydrology Award
- 2014 European Geosciences Union Henry Darcy Medal
- 2016 American Geophysical Union President of the Natural Hazards Focus Group
- 2017 American Geophysical Union Fellow
- 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow
- 2020 Jelle Zijlstra Award from the European Chamber of Digital Commerce
- 2021 Reuter's Hot List of the World's top 1000 climate scientists
- 2022 American Geophysical Union Walter Langbein Lecture
- 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers Ven Te Chow Award