Upmanu Lall

Upmanu Lall is an Indian-American engineer and founding director of the Water Institute at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. Lall also has a faculty appointment as professor in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems within the College of Global Futures. Prior to joining ASU in January 2024, Lall was the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He served as founding director of the Columbia Water Center. Lall studies how to solve water scarcity and how to predict and mitigate floods. In 2014, he was awarded the Henry Darcy Medal by the European Geosciences Union. He was named an American Geophysical Union Fellow in 2017 and their Walter Langbein Lecturer in 2022. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018, and has received the Arid Lands Hydrology and the Ven Te Chow Awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers. In April 2021 he was named to the “Hot List of the world’s 1,000 top climate scientists” by Reuters.

Early life and education
Lall was born in 1956 in Dharamsala, Himanchal Pradesh, India. He studied Civil Engineering at IIT Kanpur, and graduated in 1976. He earned his Masters and Doctorate in Civil & Environmental Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1981. His doctoral research considered the value of data in uncertainty and risk. Lall was trained in hydrology and water resources, but recognized the importance of hydrologic systems analysis, statistics and climate dynamics. In the 1990s he got interested in climate change, nonlinear dynamics and applied functional analysis. These interests led to significant contributions in nonparametric function estimation, applied statistics and hydroclimatic predictability.

Research and career
Lall works on hydrology, climate dynamics and water systems. He currently serves as the director of the Water Institute, a new program at Arizona State University launched in 2024 designed to predict and address water challenges from community to national to global scales. Lall previously served as director at the Columbia Water Center, where he looked at water scarcity, hydroclimatic extremes, infrastructure issues and risk. Lall developed a Global Flood Initiative, which predicts, manages and controls floods from a global climate dynamics perspective, and a Global Water Sustainability Initiative, which concentrates on water scarcity and risks. He was one of the first to identify the significance of climate teleconnections (climate anomalies that are related to one another over long distances) in terrestrial hydrology. Lall's current work focuses on a research program called the America's Water initiative, which seeks to develop sustainable water management and infrastructure investment strategies, and to strengthen resilience to the changing climate.

Lall has been involved in policy making and science communication, including providing insight at the World Economic Forum. He initiated the establishment of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal Water Security.

Awards and honors

 * 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers Arid Lands Hydrology Award
 * 2014 European Geosciences Union Henry Darcy Medal
 * 2016 American Geophysical Union President of the Natural Hazards Focus Group
 * 2017 American Geophysical Union Fellow
 * 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow
 * 2021 Reuter's Hot List of the World's top 1000 climate scientists:
 * 2022 American Geophysical Union Walter Langbein Lecture
 * 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers Ven Te Chow Award