Murugesu Sivapalan

 

B. Sc. Eng. (Hons), Civil Engineering, University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

M. Eng., Water Resources Engineering, Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand

M. A., Civil Engineering (major in Hydrology), Princeton University

Ph.D., Civil Engineering (major in Hydrology), Princeton University

 

 

 

Professor Sivapalan will join the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in July 2005 as full Professor in the Departments of Geography (75%) and Civil & Environmental Engineering (25%).  He specializes in catchment hydrology, with a particular focus on “predictions of ungaged basins”. Trained as a Civil Engineer with a B.Sc.Eng (Hons) degree from the University of Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) (1975), he later specialised in Surface Hydrology through a M.Eng degree from the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand (1977), and the M.A. (1983) and Ph.D (1986) degrees from Princeton University.

 

In addition to spending short stints as Instructor in Civil Engineering at the University of Sri Lanka, and as Research Associate at both the Asian Institute of Technology (1977) and at Princeton University (1986-1988), Dr Sivapalan spent four years (1978-1981) working as a Civil Engineer with a consulting company in Nigeria, West Africa (doing geotechnical engineering work). Dr Sivapalan joined the Centre for Water Research, The University of Western Australia, as a Lecturer in September 1988 and was eventually promoted to full Professor in 1999. From July 1995 to February 1996, he was the Lise Meitner Fellow of the Austrian Science Foundation at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. Between November 2000 and July 2001, he was a Visiting Professor at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.

 

Professor Sivapalan has made many valuable contributions towards the resolution of the unsolved problem of “prediction of ungauged catchments”. In particular he has carried out sustained and very productive research on scale issues in hydrologic modelling, the effects of heterogeneity of climate and landscape properties, scaling of flood frequency, and the development of balance equations for mass, momentum and energy directly at the scale of a catchment. He has successfully managed to translate these theoretical advances towards the development of predictive numerical models for the management of catchment land use for the reduction of flooding, nutrient export and salinity. Professor Sivapalan has done fundamental work on flooding and the process controls on flood frequency, which is being used to make fundamental improvements in flood estimation, especially extreme flood estimation.

 

Professor Sivapalan has supervised over 15 postgraduate students, and published over 85 journal papers. He is on the editorial boards of 6 international journals. He is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards: International Water Academy (Life Member), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (Fellow), Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand (Biennial Medal and Fellow), European Geophysical Union (John Dalton Medal), American Geophysical Union (Fellow), the Australian Government (Centenary Medal). He is the chair of the Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB), a 10-year, global initiative spearheaded by the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS).

 

Professor Sivapalan’s Web Page at the University of Western Australia