University of Wisconsin–Madison

Group Members

Daniel Wright, PhD

Arno Lenz Memorial Associate Professor of Water Resources Engineering

Education

PhD, Princeton University, 2009-2013
MSE, University of Michigan, 2005
BSE, University of Michigan, 2001-2005

Contact

Email: danielb.wright@wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 262-1978

Research Interests

Satellite and ground-based rainfall remote sensing; rainfall and flood processes at urban and regional scales; computationally-intensive simulation for probabilistic natural hazards risk assessment; statistical, stochastic, and physical hydrology; modernization of stormwater and flood management theory and practice.

Bio

Daniel Wright is the Arno Lenz Memorial Associate Professor of Water Resources Engineering and a Vilas Faculty Early Career Investigator in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research, teaching, and outreach focuses on extreme rainfall, floods, and how both are influenced by meteorology, urbanization, and climate change. His work has been supported through numerous research grants including a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellowship at Goddard Space Flight Center and a National Science Foundation CAREER, while his research achievements have been recognized via an American Geophysical Union Early Career Award and a Science and Technology Project of the Year from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. He founded and co-chairs the Infrastructure Working Group within the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts and is a co-author on the 5th National Climate Assessment, which provides a comprehensive overview of climate change and its past, present, and future impacts on the United States.


Yagmur Derin, PhD

Research Scientist

Education

PhD, University of Connecticut, 2019

MSc, Middle East Technical University, 2014

BSc, Middle East Technical University, 2011

Research Interests

Yagmur’s research interests lie in quantitative understanding of precipitation and related natural hazards in different environmental regimes. Major focus areas include remote sensing for hydrometeorology and hydrology, and characterization and quantification of orographic precipitation, and radar and satellite remote sensing of precipitation.

Bio

Yagmur Derin is a Research Scientist in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is broadly interested in using data from a variety of sources to better characterize quantitative precipitation estimates to improve accuracy and speed of hydrological models. Her specific research interests are centered around understanding and characterization of precipitation processes, particularly over challenging and poorly instrumented regions such as mountainous and coastal areas. Her work has been recognized by the International Precipitation Working Group via an Early Career Scientist First Prize. While a postdoc at the University of Oklahoma, she was co-PI on five proposals funded by NASA, NSF, and NOAA. She also co-chaired an NSF-funded workshop to communicate with local communities and identify scalable, sustainable, and transferable solutions for post-wildfire disasters. She served as a program committee and local organizing committee member for the 14th International Precipitation Conference, hosted at the University of Oklahoma in June 2023.


MohammadSadegh (Mo) Abbasian, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Education

BS, Power and Water University of Technology, 2012

MS, Sharif University of Technology, 2014

PhD, Sharif University of Technology, 2020

Contact
Bio

Mo has received his bachelors in Civil Engineeing from Power and Water University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, and his masters and PhD also in Civil Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. In his bachelors thesis, he worked on bivariate analysis of flood peak discharge and volume using copulas. During his masters and PhD, he primarily focused on the statistical analysis of climate change impacts on drought characteristics over the Lake Urmia Basin, which is a hydrologically critical region located in a semi-arid region in northwest Iran. He developed a novel multi-site statistical downscaling model to downscale precipitation and temperature from the outputs of General Circulation Models (GCMs) over a hydrologic unit. He also introduced the Precipitation–Temperature Deciled Index (PTDI) to characterize drought conditions based on the joint variability of precipitation–temperature, particularly under climate change. During his PhD, Mo pursued 9 months of his research as a visiting scholar at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. He also regularly participated in conferences, workshops, and seminars, including The 27th International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) General Assembly, Montreal. In the Hydroclimate Extremes Research Group, Mo will perform data analysis, and hydrologic and flood simulations, in close coordination with Dr. Wright and climate scientists at UW-Madison.


Ankita Pradhan, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Education

BS, Government College of Engineering, 2013

MTech, IIT-Bombay, 2016

PhD, IIT-Bombay, 2023

Contact
Bio

Ankita received her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Government College of Engineering in Odisha, India. She earned a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India in 2016 with a specialization in Remote Sensing applications Water Resources. Her research for her master’s degree focused on GIS-based floodplain zoning. Her PhD research, also at IIT-Bombay,  focused on the Impact of Microwave Remote Sensing Based Precipitation Uncertainty on Hydrological Modeling. At UW-Madison, she will be working on a “process-based” solution to estimating flood frequencies based on flood physical drivers and their changes. She has received highly-selective travel grants from AGU to attend the 2017 and 2019 Fall Meetings in the United States. She was also selected as a member of the NASA PMM science team in 2019.


Aaron Alexander

PhD Student

Education

MS, University of California, Davis

BS, University of Nevada, Reno

Contact
Research Interests

Aaron’s research interests lie in how surface hydrology drives atmospheric processes and how these processes influence hydrometeorological extremes and the hydroclimatology in both urban and rural settings.

Bio

Aaron received two bachelors degrees in Physics and Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2017. In 2020, Aaron earned a Master’s Degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering with an emphasis in Water Resources from the University of California, Davis. His research at UC Davis focused on quantifying the role of soil moisture as a driver of land-atmosphere coupling within California’s Central Valley through the use of high resolution climate modeling platforms. He further helped developed the Summertime Observational Land-Atmosphere Coupling Experiment (SOLACE) during the summer of 2019 in the Central Valley. While not participating in research, Aaron serves as a member of the Student Conference Planning Committee for the American Meteorological Society.


Ashar Hussain

PhD Student

Education

MTech, Indian Institute of Science,2020-2022
BTech, Jamia Milia Islamia, 2015-2019

Contact
Bio

Ashar received his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi. He then went for his master’s in water resources and environmental engineering at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, where he worked on the application of machine learning to improve crowd-sourcing rainfall estimates. In 2022 he worked as a project assistant at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT-D), where he worked on a satellite simulator for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, and ways to find the river discharge estimates completely using satellite data.


Benjamin FitzGerald

PhD Student

Education

BS, University of Notre Dame 2018-2022

Contact
Bio

Ben received his bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2022. Some of his undergraduate research centered on using groundwater modeling software to run risk assessments. He spent 2021-2022 as a USGS Pathways Intern at the St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center. There he researched wave runup and coastal image processing. At UW-Madison, Ben is focusing on how flood frequency is changing due to climate change.


Kaidi Peng

PhD Student

Education

BS, Tongji University, 2018-2022

Contact
Bio

Kaidi received her bachelor’s degree in surveying engineering at Tongji University in 2022. Her undergraduate research interests lay in remote sensing data processing, multi-source satellite data fusion, and their application in agriculture and hydrology. At UW-Madison, she focuses on uncertainty estimation for satellite precipitation products without ground-based observations.


Yichen Tao

PhD Student

Education

MS, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2021

BE, China University of Petroleum-Beijing, 2017

Contact
Bio

Yichen received her bachelor’s degree in Petroleum Engineering from the China University of Petroleum-Beijing in 2017. From 2019 to 2021, she majored in Hydrology and Water Quality at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, focusing on modeling supercritical CO2 behavior in the subsurface.


Yuan Liu

PhD Student

Education

BS, Dalian University of Technology, 2016-2020

Contact
Bio

Yuan received his bachelor’s degree in Harbor, Waterway, and Coastal Engineering at Dalian University of Technology (DLUT) in 2020. His undergraduate research focused on the application of image processing and deep learning on liquid sloshing dynamics. In 2020, he worked as the research assistant at the Institute of Water Resource and Flood Control, DLUT, focusing on the multi-index impact assessment of inter-basin water transfer projects. At UW-Madison, he is working on investigating the regional hydroclimate of extreme rainfall and flooding using “object-oriented” multivariate characterizations of extreme storm events.


Sophie Van Alsburg

MS Student, Water Resources Management Program

Education

BSE, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington

Bio

Sophie graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a concentration in hydrology. She is currently in the Water Resources Management (WRM) Master’s program at UW-Madison. The WRM program’s practicum aims to restore Fancy Creek, located in the Driftless Area Ecoregion in Wisconsin. The creek is being converted from a channel ditch stream to its historic, meandering flow, and Sophie is researching how this will affect floodplains, wetlands, and the biology in the region. Within the Hydroclimate Extremes Research Group, Sophie is studying the connections impacts of climate change on UW-Madison’s campus stormwater management infrastructure.


Davide Zoccatelli, PhD

Former Postdoctoral Research Associate


Zhe Li, PhD

Former Postdoctoral Research Associate


Yihan Li, PhD

Former PhD student


Samantha Hartke, PhD

Former PhD Student


Guo Yu, PhD

Former PhD Student


Camila Abe

Former PhD Student


Alexa Sampson

Former Masters Student


Chris Bosma

Former Masters Student


Patrick Byrne

Former Undergraduate Student Researcher


Cassia Smith

Former Visiting Undergraduate Researcher from University of the Virgin Islands


Mary Riker

Former Undergraduate Researcher


Allison Lobue

Former Undergraduate Student Researcher


Christoffer Andersen

Former Visiting PhD Student from Aalborg University


Zhihua Zhu, PhD

Former Visiting PhD Student from Sun Yat-Sen University