Megan Konar's research embodies the transformative power of interdisciplinary environmental science in the Anthropocene. Her pioneering work has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the complex interactions between water resources, food security and global trade patterns. In her landmark 2011 Water Resources Research paper, she was the first to analyze the intricate spatiotemporal patterns of virtual water flows worldwide, establishing a new paradigm for understanding how water resources are embedded in and transported through global food systems. This breakthrough opened entirely new avenues for investigating the water-food-trade nexus, a domain she continues to lead with unparalleled insight and innovation.

Building on this foundation, Konar has systematically illuminated how socioeconomic factors govern virtual water trade, developing sophisticated quantitative frameworks that bridge hydrology, economics and network science. Her research has revealed patterns of resilience and critical vulnerabilities in our global food and water systems while providing fresh insights into how trade policies influence the worldwide displacement of water use. These discoveries have proven essential for understanding regional food and economic security in the face of climate change and market disruptions. Her investigations of virtual groundwater exports associated with irrigated crop transport have transformed our understanding of how supply chains affect regional water sustainability.

Konar's intellectual breadth is matched by her commitment to societal impact. Her work has directly shaped water policy and planning while catalyzing the formation of a dynamic community of hydrologists investigating the social dimensions of water science. Her research consistently appears in leading journals across multiple disciplines, advancing fundamental knowledge and synthesizing insights that resonate throughout academia and beyond.

As a mentor and leader, Konar inspires those around her to think expansively and delve deeply into the challenges of coupled natural-human systems. She has emerged as a trusted voice of academia and a role model for young scholars, particularly women in hydrological sciences. Her achievements have been recognized through numerous honors, including a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the AGU Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award and the prestigious Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize. Her work exemplifies how modern Earth science can address pressing societal challenges through rigorous, interdisciplinary research that spans local to global scales. Through her groundbreaking contributions to understanding the water-food-trade nexus and her advancement of sociohydrology, Megan Konar has defined new frontiers in Earth system science that will influence research and policy for decades to come.

—Kelly Caylor
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California

Megan Konar, Di Long, and Kaveh Madani received the Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2019, held 9–13 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes “scientists who demonstrate outstanding contributions to hydrologic sciences, education, or societal impacts and show exceptional promise of continued contributions to hydrology throughout their career.”  

Megan Konar’s scholarship has transformed our understanding of how economic and social forces influence global hydrologic flows and clarified the effects of these coupled dynamics on water security challenges. She has distinguished herself as a scholar who is exceptionally creative in addressing compelling water resources questions in coupled human–natural systems. Megan can move—seemingly effortlessly—between fundamental contributions to the field and more general synthesis and integrative work that resonates across academia. In my opinion, her capacity to integrate disciplinary expertise and multidisciplinary impact is something that Megan does better than any other young hydrologist working today.

At Princeton University, Megan’s Ph.D. research was the first to quantify the global virtual water trade network and to assess its temporal dynamics. She has continued to build on those efforts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is addressing how climate change and trade policies combine to affect water use for the countries of the world. Most recently, she has shown that open trade leads to less water use for nations, on average. These efforts are notable not just for the breadth of their intellectual ambition but also for the depth of rigor with which she addresses such complex, multidisciplinary topics.

In every one of her research manuscripts, Megan asks insightful questions and adopts novel quantitative approaches to reveal the fundamental roles that agricultural water use and food trade play in governing the vulnerability and resiliency of coupled water and food systems. She is conducting trailblazing work and successfully mentoring her students to push the boundaries of what it means to do interdisciplinary water resources science. In all respects, Dr. Konar’s research trajectory has already established her as a world leader in the study of the water–food–trade nexus and the characterization of coupled natural–human water resources systems.

—Kelly Caylor, University of California, Santa Barbara

I am deeply honored to receive the Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award. This award is particularly meaningful to me because my research is interdisciplinary, yet I have always felt welcomed and encouraged by the AGU hydrology community. First and foremost, I would like to thank Kelly Caylor for his nomination and generous citation. He is my role model and a constant source of inspiration. In addition, I would like to thank Arjen Hoekstra, George Hornberger, Bridget Scanlon, and Eric Wood for their support throughout the nomination process and my career. Murugesu Sivapalan has been an essential mentor and advocate for me during my early faculty career. I was lucky to have an amazing cohort during my Ph.D. at Princeton. I would not be where I am today without my grad school friends and mentors. Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe was a wonderful advisor who pushed me to ask exciting questions and strive for elegant solutions. Carole Dalin and I were in the same group and have been close collaborators and friends ever since. I am also deeply grateful for Tara Troy’s friendship and peer mentoring for more than a decade. I am especially indebted to my amazing students and collaborators, with whom I share this award. My colleagues in civil and environmental engineering at Illinois have been wonderful to work with. I benefited from camaraderie and weekly lunches with my Hydro colleagues (Ximing Cai, Marcelo Garcia, Praveen Kumar, Gary Parker, Art Schmidt, Ashlynn Stillwell, Rafael Tinoco, and Albert Valocchi). I had two children on the tenure clock and am grateful for the family-friendly atmosphere and policies at Illinois. My children, Sarah, 6, and Sam, 3, are constantly entertaining and a source of motivation. Rus Irani, my husband, has been instrumental to everything and has made it all a wonderfully fun journey. —Megan Konar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign