Advisory Board

Dr. Upmanu Lall is the Director of the Columbia Water Center and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering, and the Chair of the Dept. of Earth & Environmental Engineering at Columbia University.

He has broad interests in subjects of hydrology, climate dynamics, water resource systems analysis, risk management and sustainability. He is motivated by challenging questions at the intersection of these fields, especially where they have relevance to societal outcomes or to the advancement of science towards innovative application.

Dr. Lall has authored many research papers in international journals that focus on hydrology, water resources, climate, physics, applied mathematics and statistics, development, policy and management science. He has been engaged in high level public and scientific discussion through the media, World Economic Forum, and with governments, foundations, development banks, and corporations interested in sustainability. He has served on several national and international panels.

Dr. Lall is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was awarded the Henry Darcy Medal by the European Geosciences Union, and the Arid Lands Hydrology Award by the American Society of Civil Engineers

Dr. Vijay Modi is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University. His expertise is in the field of: energy sources and conversion, heat/mass transfer, and fluid mechanics.

Prof. Modi is currently working closely with city and national agencies/utilities to understand how energy services can be more accessible, more efficient, and cleaner. Modi’s areas of expertise are energy resources and energy conversion technologies. While his early work was on computational fluid dynamics and micro-electro-mechanical systems, his recent work has been on energy infrastructure design and planning, solar energy, energy efficiency in agriculture, and data analytics spanning urban settings to remote rural settings.

He was a member of the U.N. Secretary General’s high-level task force on “Sustainable Energy for All” and he currently leads the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network working group on Energy Access for All.

Prof. Modi received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984 and worked as a post-doc at MIT from 1984 to 1986 before joining the faculty at Columbia University.

Dr. Naresh Devineni is an Associate Professor  at the Grove School of Engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering, The City University of New York’s City College. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from North Carolina State University, USA. He has diverse interests in hydro-climate modelling and extremes analysis, statistical methods, water sustainability and risk assessment and water systems analysis. He operates the Risky Waters Lab where he investigates interactions of climate and water.

Naresh has co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and currently, he is running three initiatives in his Risky Waters Lab – Water Sustainability, Hydrometeorological Extremes and Dynamic Risk Management.

Dr. Devineni is also the creator of a data science blog where people of all backgrounds and ages can learn data analysis, probability, and statistics in a fun and intuitive way without the technical lingo.