Praveen Kumar, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UIUC
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Praveen Kumar has been on the faculty of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois since 1995. Prior to joining University of Illinois, he was a research scientist (January 1993 to July 1995) at the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and Hydrologic Sciences Branch, NASA- Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. He holds a B.Tech. (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India 1987), M.S. (Iowa State University 1989), and Ph.D. (University of Minnesota 1993), all in civil engineering. Professor Kumar has research interests in the areas of hydroclimatology, geomorphology and hydrologic information systems. The overall goal of his research is to improve our understanding of hydrologic processes at large spatial (regional to continental and global) and temporal scales (seasonal to inter-annual) with particular emphasis on understanding and modeling multiple scale non-linear interactions among sub-processes. This entails identifying the precise nature of the underlying multi-scale variability of processes; identifying the presence of symmetries across scales (also called self-similarity), both for their scientific merit and for exploiting them to improve our modeling capability; and utilizing large scale field and remote sensing observations in models to study the complexity of their dynamical response; and using knowledge discovery (KDD/Data Mining) tools to find hidden relationships in large multivariate databases. In 1993 Dr. Kumar received the Universities Space Research Association Award for Promise and Potential of a Young Scientist. In 1996 he received the NASA New Young Investigator Award. He was selected as the NCSA/UIUC Faculty Fellow for 2001-2002. He has also been recognized for teaching excellence by having been listed in the UIUC Incomplete List of Teachers Rated as Excellent by their Students. Dr. Kumar served as the Associate Editor (1998-2001) for Water Resources Research (Published by American Geophysical Union). Since 1992 he is a member of Precipitation Committee, Hydrology Section of the American Geophysical Union and served as the Chair during 1999-2001.
