Professor Efi Foufoula-Georgiou (Greece/USA) is the recipient of the 2023 Dooge Medal (International Hydrology Prize) of IAHS/UNESCO/WMO
For seminal contributions to mathematical hydrology and for international leadership in understanding the multi-scale dynamics of precipitation and river landforms .
Citation for Professor Efi Foufoula-Georgiou by Salvatore Grimaldi
Professor Efi Foufoula-Georgiou studied at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece, where she obtained her Diploma in 1979 in Civil Engineering. Following the Master of Science in 1982 and the PhD in 1985 at University of Florida, she was appointed as assistant professor at Iowa State University. Presently, she is Distinguished Professor, Associate Dean, and Samueli Enodwen chair in Engineering at University of California, Irvine.
It is impossible to summarize in a few words the long record of achievements, just to mention few:
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- More than 200 hundred publications, high impact factor, high h-index, a huge number of citations, Editor in chief of prestigious journals, Leader in international associations, awarded of outstanding medals (i.e. Horton and Dalton).
- Efi’s research over the years has been broad and multi-faceted, but always with the common thread of advancing process understanding, modeling, and prediction by analyzing the space-time organization of natural processes in mathematically and physically disciplined ways.
- Efi’s group was the first to introduce more than 30 years ago rigorous multi-scale analysis formalisms for quantifying the space-time structure in precipitation, developing downscaling schemes for hydrologic use at the small basin scale, building quantitative metrics to assess numerical weather model performance, and enhancing understanding of predictive ability for hydrologic applications.
- Even more impressively, her group keeps breaking new ground in hydro-climate and predictive analytics.
In hydro-geomorphology and river dynamics, Efi’s group has introduced novel approaches for understanding the multi-scale dynamics of braider rivers and delta river networks. Her group pioneered the use of spectral graph theory to quantify the complex channel networks formed in lowland coastal distributary landscapes, which are especially vulnerable due to sea level rise and sediment deprivation from upstream basins.
In summary, Prof. Foufoula-Georgiou is an international thought leader in scientific hydrology having contributed over her career to innovative, creative, and new ideas in hydrology and hydro-geomorphology. She is an outstanding community builder promoting the growth of the field and the engagement of junior scientists from all over the world.
Her reputation precedes her.
Therefore, it is my absolute pleasure and great privilege to award the 2023 Dooge medal to Professor Efi Foufoula-Georgiou “For seminal contributions to mathematical hydrology and for international leadership in understanding the multi-scale dynamics of precipitation and river landforms”.