Professor , Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

AGU embraces the global community and welcomes leaders representing various identities, voices, and perspectives. List any identities, voices, and perspectives you would bring, including but not limited to nationality, regional representations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and anything else you feel comfortable sharing.

I will work to ensure that all perspectives are heard with respect and full consideration. Our solutions must be globally relevant and must therefore draw on all the viewpoints. Additionally, for the education and outreach efforts to have the needed impact we must be sure to maximize Inclusivity.

Volunteer experience that relates to this position:

Chair of Princeton CEE (Civil and Environmental Engineering) Advisory Committee; Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Board of Directors (Past); Water Resources Research, Associate Editor (Past); NASA Flood and Droughts Committee (Past); National Science Foundation Panels (Past)

This role aims to catalyze community and build AGU as envisioned by the strategic plan. This leadership position is a dual role - helping to advance AGU’s strategic plan as a member of Council and leading your section. How would you support the Board, staff and other sections to achieve AGU’s vision, values, mission, and goals? How will you engage with members of your section to execute AGU’s strategic plan?

The AGU strategic goals offer a template for our section to capture the power of the community and leverage partnerships to advance scientific discovery to the betterment of society. We find ourselves at a critical point in our history. Having grown dramatically over the 30+ years since Pete Eagleson's committee made the case for this distinct geoscience, we now are tremendously broad in focus and with a large and diffuse number of publication outlets. This brings risk of losing efficiency in advancing the field. An important role of the section leadership is in providing the organizational guidance for continually clarifying the boundary between the solved and unsolved problems. I believe this must be done in an inclusive manner to bring all voices to the conversation. Additionally, we have remarkable growth in sensor data and artificial intelligence and machine learning tools. Together they bring unprecedented power to hydrologic forecasting, but with risk of disconnecting observations and continued scientific discovery. I believe with proper leadership and a focus on integrating physics-based and machine learning tools, we can achieve interpretability and harness the emerging data sets and analytics tools to accelerate scientific discovery. We also must organize our international partners for fostering a conversation toward designing globally effective mitigation pathways and overall solutions. I hope to harness the technical committees, the remarkable talent of our younger scientists, and the energy of this session conveners to bring together a focus on advancing our discovery while always vectoring the efforts toward betterment of society.

Section affiliations:

Atmospheric Sciences; Biogeosciences; Hydrology