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Join AIFARMS for our monthly seminar series during the Spring semester on Tuesday, February 21 at 3:00 pm CST to hear from Dr. Praveen Kumar, Executive Director for Prairie Research Institute, Urbana-Champaign, and the Colonel Harry F. and Frankie M. Lovell Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, who will be presenting "Introduction to Prairie Research Institute." This event will be a hybrid event at NCSA in room 1030, and in-person attendance is encouraged.
Seminar link: https://go.illinois.edu/AIFARMSSeminarSeries
Speaker Bio:Praveen Kumar is the Executive Director for Prairie Research Institute, Urbana-Champaign, and the Colonel Harry F. and Frankie M. Lovell Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Kumar, an expert in hydrology and a seasoned research leader, studies the complex interactions between the water cycle, climate change, vegetation, and surface and sub-surface transport of water and chemicals in human-dominated and natural systems. He has affiliate appointments in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology; and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment.
Professor 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. Kumar joined as a faculty at Univ. of Illinois in 1995 where he has been since. Prior to joining the 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. His research deals with Hydrocomplexity, the quantitative understanding and prediction of emergent patterns of form and function that arise from complex non-linear multi-scale interactions between soil, water, climate, vegetation, and human systems; and how this understanding can be used for innovative solutions to water and sustainability challenges. He has made extensive, deep, and signature contributions pertaining to Critical Zone science for intensively managed landscapes, biosphere-hydrosphere interactions, multi-scale variability of hydrologic processes, hydro-geomorphology, hydroinformatics, and information theory in geosciences. His research has been funded by federal agencies such as NSF, NASA, and NOAA.