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Dr. Siddharth Saksena - Headshot

Areas of Interest

Hydraulics and Hydrology; Flood Forecasting; Hydroinformatics; Watershed Modeling; Flood Risk; ML/AI applications for flood prediction; Climate change impacts on flood risk propagation; Biostatistics enthusiast

Research Overview

My research focuses on developing physics-based and data-driven models/tools for enhancing the flood resilience of communities in response to land use and climate change. Some of the research areas include (1) developing cost-effective techniques for improved flood inundation mapping; (2) real-time flood prediction and forecasting for delivering infrastructure-level flood impact information at a national scale; (3) building large-scale computationally efficient solutions for identifying regions more susceptible to flooding; (4) improving the accuracy of hydrologic-hydraulic models using innovative approaches for integrating surface water, groundwater, and stormwater; and (5) evaluating the role of geospatial descriptors on hydrologic-hydraulic modeling in data sparce regions.

Education

  • Ph.D, Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, 2019

  • M.S., Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, 2014

  • B.Tech., Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India, 2012

Courses Taught

  • CEE 5224 Advanced GIS in Hydrologic Analysis

  • CEE 3314 Water Resources Engineering 

  • CEE 4304/5334 Hydrology/Quantitative Hydrology

Flood inundation during Hurricane Harvey in Houston, TX

Professional Honors and Awards

  • A. Ivan Johnson Award for Young Professionals, American Water Resources Association, 2022

  • Universities Council on Water Resources Engineering, PhD Dissertation Award, Runner-up, 2020

  • Nellie Munson Teaching Assistant Award, Purdue University, 2018

  • Best Graduate Student Paper Award, American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) World Environmental and Water Resources Congress, 2017 and 2015

  • CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc.) Pathfinder Fellowship, 2017

Professional Service

  • Associate Editor, Journal of American Water Resources Association (JAWRA), 2022 - present

  • Technology Committee Chair, American Water Resources Association (AWRA), 2021 - present

  • Conference General Co-Chair, 2024 AWRA Geospatial Water Technology Conference, Orlando, FL, 2023 - 2024

  • Technical Director, 2024 AWRA, UCOWR & NIWR 60th Anniversary Annual Conference. St. Louis, MO, 2023 - 2024

  • Technical Advisory Team, Texas Integrated Flooding Framework (TIFF), Texas Water Development Board, 2021 - present

  • Faculty Representative, Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI), Virginia Tech, 2022 - present

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