Jasper A. Vrugt

Jasper A. Vrugt (born 1976) is a Dutch scientist/engineer/applied mathematician known for his work in the earth sciences: surface hydrology, soil physics, hydrogeophysics, hydrometeorology, and geophysics. Vrugt is an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth System Science. He also holds a part-time appointment as associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Science (CGE).

Life and career
<!--

Early years
Vrugt was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He graduated from The University of Amsterdam where he received his MS (Cum Laude) and PhD degree (Cum Laude). During the final stage of his MS degree, he spent 6 months at the University of California, Davis to work with Jan Hopmans. This work led to the development of two- and three-dimensional root water uptake models, and was one of the first vadose zone modeling inverse modeling studies that used a three-dimensional description of the subsurface for parameter estimation using distributed computing.

During his PhD, Vrugt developed concepts and algorithms for analysis of the information content of experimental data and Bayesian, and multi-criteria treatment and quantification of model parameter, state, and predictive uncertainty. Part of this work was performed at the University of Arizona, under Hoshin Gupta and Soroosh Sorooshian.

Career
After completion of his doctorate, Vrugt started working as a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). In 2006, Vrugt was appointed as J. Robert Oppenheimer (JRO) distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, also at LANL. Two main contributions during his JRO appointment include a novel concept of self-adaptive multimethod evolutionary optimization for single and multiple objective parameter estimation, and an adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) scheme (DREAM) for sampling of complex high-dimensional posterior distributions. Vrugt’s creative idea of running multiple search algorithms concurrently that learn from each other through information exchange using a common population of points is perhaps the most elegant way of exploiting the strengths of individual search methods to address the No Free Lunch Theorem. Numerical experiments demonstrate that AMALGAM and DREAM outperform existing evolutionary and MCMC approaches. These methods are especially designed to take maximum advantage of distributed computing facilities, and are currently being applied to a wide range of inference problems

In 2010, Vrugt was appointed Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

Professional
-->

Vrugt has received several awards. He received the 2011 Donath Medal (Young Scientist Award) of the Geological Society of America (GSA). As recipient of this medal, Dr. Vrugt was made GSA Fellow in 2012. In 2010, he received the James B. Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) for outstanding contributions in surface hydrology, soil physics, and hydrometeorology, and was simultaneously elected AGU Fellow. In the same year, he was also recognized with the Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the European Geosciences Union (EGU),. Vrugt is the first scientist to receive all three honors: the Donath Medal (GSA), James B. Macelwane Medal (AGU) and the Outstanding Young Scientist Award (EGU).

He is Associate Editor of  Water Resources Research.

Awards and recognition

 * Sir Frederick McMaster Fellowship, CSIRO
 * Fellow, Geological Society of America (GSA)
 * Editors' Choice Award, Water Resources Research, American Geophysical Union
 * Fellow, American Geophysical Union
 * Young Scientist Award (Donath Medal), Geological Society of America
 * Young Outstanding Scientist Award, European Geophysical Union
 * James B. Macelwane Medalist, American Geophysical Union
 * Early Career Award in Soil Physics, Soil Science Society of America
 * Hydrology Prize 2004 - 2006, Netherlands Hydrological Society (NHV)
 * Elsevier Top 50 of most talented young people in the Netherlands