October 06, 2021. Evan Kodra, SDS Lab alumnus and CEO of climate risk analytics startup risQ , delivers an invited (virtual) keynote titled " Climate Resilience from Academia to Startup " at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay to their Climate Change Interdisciplinary Program (IDP). Dr. Kodra has delivered talks on this broad topic at a recent NOAA AI workshop and at Northeastern University.
September 24, 2021. NBC News featured a video clip in their Climate Challenge section titled "Latinos disproportionately impacted by wildfires". The video is available on YouTube here. The acknowledgment to risQ is from around 0:30 to around 0:50, while from around 0:40 to around 0:50 the video zooms in on the risQ report. The startup risQ was co-founded by 2014 SDS Lab PhD alumnus Evan Kodra and SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly, along with Northeastern alumnus Colin Sullivan.
September 20, 2021. SDS Lab PhD student Nishant Yadav starts an internship with (and funded by) the Hitachi AI Labs in Santa Clara, CA from September 20 onwards. In 2020, Nishant interned with the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA, funded by the NSF INTERN program. In 2019, Nishant interned with the US DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA, where he was funded by PNNL. Nishant's interdisciplinary and experiential PhD program at the SDS Lab thus includes three internships from three types of organizations, specifically, a federal agency, a national laboratory, and a private company.
July 4, 2021. Happy Fourth! Kate Duffy's PhD dissertation defense is on July 15 at noon Eastern. Join the public defense here. Her dissertation research intersects climate impacts on ecology and deep learning based emulation for satellite remote sensing. Kate's work in climate-ecology may be viewed as a continuation of the broad research theme initiated by the SDS Lab and collaborators (e.g., see this Nature paper). Her work in deep emulation for satellite data mining has been joint with NASA Ames. Kate will join NASA as a scientist following her PhD.
July 1, 2021. Welcome Dr. Antonia Sohns and Dr. Sebastian Ruf as "AI for Climate" postdoctoral research associates under the Northeastern Experiential AI Postdoc program. Read Antonia's paper on participatory modeling for water vulnerability and Sebastian's paper on contagion spread in social networks.
June 28, 2021. Poulomi Ganguli's Scientific Reports paper on the water-energy nexus highlighted in an E&E News article. The news article also highlights the work by Shih-Chieh Kao. Poulomi is currently a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur while Kao (see his previous paper on precipitation extremes under a changing climate) is a scientist at US DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Poulomi and Kao were both postdoctoral researchers with SDS Lab PI Auroop Ganguly at Northeastern and US DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) respectively.
June 1, 2021. Stone Chen will join the SDS Lab as a PhD student starting Fall 2021. His prior collaborative work on physics-guided uncertainty quantification with Boston-based startup risQ CEO Evan Kodra and Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar professor Udit Bhatia was published in Scientific Reports. Evan and Udit are former PhD students who graduated from the SDS Lab, while risQ is a spinout of the Lab.
May/June 2021. Doctoral students Puja Das and Jack Watson join internships at NASA Ames and US DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) respectively. Puja is working with TJ Vandal and Kate Duffy, (former and about-to-defend, respectively) SDS Lab PhD students now at NASA Ames, on quantitative precipitation estimation with satellite data and machine learning methods. Jack is working with Auroop Ganguly (via his PNNL affiliation) and other collaborators including Sam Chatterjee (PNNL project lead) on national critical functions with a focus on infrastructure resilience. Jack will build upon the prior work by SDS Lab PhD student Nishant Yadav (read the paper here, a news article there, and access the open-access codes on GitHub). The line of work also relates to the research of former SDS Lab PhD student Kevin Clark (see his paper here), who now leads the Aviation Facilities and Business Services division (here) at US DOT's VOLPE.
May 26, 2021. Subimal Ghosh, professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and a long time collaborator of the SDS Lab (and it's prior incarnation at ORNL, where he was a visiting professor with Auroop Ganguly), gets AGU's prestigious Devendra Lal Memorial award. See the AGU News article here. Read one of his prior papers, developed in collaboration with the SDS Lab and collaborators, on Indian monsoon rainfall extremes in Nature Climate Change here.
March 22, 2021. Shashank Konduri, PhD student at the SDS Lab, joins NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Read the Northeastern College of Engineering news article and one of Shashank's papers on remote sensing here. Shashank's work was joint with long-time SDS Lab collaborators and ORNL scientists Forrest Hoffman and Jitendra Kumar.
October 21, 2020. Auroop Ganguly is quoted in an article on the climate-water-energy nexus by S&P Global. The increasing focus in the US and internationally on climate adaptation, infrastructure resilience, and urban sustainability is well aligned with the SDS Lab research focus. Auroop's presentation (see vimeo link here: first 25 minutes or so) at a US National Academies workshop provides an overview. For those new to these topics, read the AGU blog on global weirding (also see Auroop's quotes here and there), "water and the built environment" editorial article in Frontiers (also the SDS Lab textbook on the topic), as well as the National Academies Press workshop proceedings here.
January 8, 2020. New tool for measuring climate risk in municipal bonds emerges from stealth: risQ and Intercontinental Exchange Announce Collaboration to Bring Climate Risk Analytics to the Municipal Bond Ecosystem. See the news article from Business Wire here and go to the "About risQ" website for more information on the company's origins.
View related news by the Northeastern College of Engineering here