Biographic Sketch

Efi Foufoula-Georgiou is a University of Minnesota McKnight Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering. She is co-director of the NSF Science and Technology Center “National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics” (NCED), and has served as director of St. Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. She received a diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and an M.S. and Ph.D. (1985) in Environmental Engineering from the University of Florida. Her area of research is hydrology and geomorphology, with special interest on scaling theories, multiscale dynamics and space-time modeling of precipitation and landforms. She has served as associate editor of Water Resources Research, J. of Geophysical Research, Advances in Water Resources, Hydrologic and Earth System Sciences, and as editor of J. Hydrometeorology . She has also served in many national and international advisory boards including the Water Science and Technology Board, NSF, NASA and EU proposal review panels, and in several NRC studies. She is currently a member of the executive committee of CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences). Prof. Foufoula has been the recipient of the John Dalton Medal of the European Geophysical Society and she is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society, and a member of the European Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests

Major research interests are in the area of stochastic modeling of surface hydrologic and geomorphologic processes. Specific areas of research include modeling and estimation of space-time rainfall using rain gauge, radar, and satellite data; geomorphologic study of river networks, channel morphology, and hydrologic response. Current research focuses on understanding and quantifying the statistical structure of hydrologic processes at a range of scales of interest to hydrology. The purpose is to unravel scale invariant relationships from the highly irregular patterns exhibited by most hydro-geomorphologic processes, because most such relationships would have important practical implications for modeling, measurement and prediction over a range of scales. Of particular interest are remotely sensed rainfall fields and channel/channel network structures.