Praveen Kumar

Professor

2527B Hydrosystems Laboratory

Phone: (217) 333-4688

Fax: (217) 333-0687

Email: kumar1@uiuc.edu

Personal website: http://cee.uiuc.edu/people/kumar1/

Praveen Kumar holds a B.Tech. (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India 1987), M.S. (Iowa State University 1989), and Ph.D. (University of Minnesota 1993), all in civil engineering. He has been on the faculty of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois since 1995. Prior to joining University of Illinois, he was a research scientist (January 1993 to July 1995) at the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and Hydrologic Sciences Branch, NASA- Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA.

Dr. Kumar has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in hydrosystems engineering, engineering modeling under uncertainty, surface water hydrology, advanced hydrologic modeling, stochastic hydrology, non-linear methods in hydrology, and hydroinformatics.

Dr. Kumar has research interests in the areas of hydroclimatology, ecohydrology, geomorphology, and hydroinformatics. The overall goal of Dr. Kumar’s research is to improve our understanding of hydrologic processes at large spatial (regional to continental and global) and temporal scales (seasonal to inter-annual) with particular emphasis on understanding and modeling multiple scale non-linear interactions among sub-processes. This entails identifying the precise nature of the underlying multi-scale variability of processes; identifying the presence of symmetries across scales (also called self-similarity), both for their scientific merit and for exploiting them to improve our modeling capability; and utilizing large scale field and remote sensing observations in models to study the complexity of their dynamical response; and using knowledge discovery (KDD/Data Mining) tools to find hidden relationships in large multivariate databases.

In 1993 Dr. Kumar received the Universities Space Research Association Award for Promise and Potential of a Young Scientist. In 1996 he received the NASA New Young Investigator Award. He was selected as the NCSA/UIUC Faculty Fellow for 2001-2002. In 2005 he received the Xerox Award for Faculty Research. He has also been recognized for teaching excellence by having been listed several times in the UIUC Incomplete List of Teachers Rated as Excellent by their Students.

Dr. Kumar is currently the Editor for Geophysical Research Letters. In the past he has served as the Associate Editor (1998-2001) for Water Resources Research (Published by American Geophysical Union) and for ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering (2003-2004). He is a member of Precipitation Committee, and Remote Sensing Committee of the Hydrology Section of the American Geophysical Union and served as the Chair of Precipitation Committee during 1999-2001. He is a member of the CUHASI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science) Board of Directors (2002-2008), and also serves on the Advisory Board of CLEANER (Collaborative Large Scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research).