Chester and Helen Siess Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Focus: Water Resources Engineering and Science

Biography: Murugesu Sivapalan holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering (University of Ceylon 1975), M.Eng in Water Resources Engineering (Asian Institute of Technology Thailand 1977), and M.A. (1983) and Ph.D (1986) in Civil Engineering, with a major in hydrology, from Princeton University.

Between 1978 and 1981, Dr Sivapalan worked as a consulting civil engineer in Nigeria. During the period 1986-1988 he served as a Research Associate at Princeton University. He spent the next 17 years at the University of Western Australia, Perth, joining as a Lecturer in 1988 before being promoted to full Professor in 1999. He joined the University of Illinois in 2005. Dr Sivapalan has also served as Visiting Professor at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, Tsinghua University, China, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

Dr Sivapalan was founding chair of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) Decade on Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB) initiative. He has been a member of the editorial boards of several international journals and was Executive Editor of the European Geosciences Union's Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS) journal for 10 years.

Dr. Sivapalan has been elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Fellow of the Modeling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand, and Life Member of the International Water Academy. He is the recipient of the International Hydrology Prize from the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, the John Dalton Medal from the European Geosciences Union, the Biennial Medal (for Natural Systems) from the Modeling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand, and the Hydrological Sciences Award from the American Geophysical Union. He has also received the prestigious Robert E Horton Medal from the American Geophysical Union, and the Alfred Wegener Medal from the European Geosciences Union (EGU), one of three equally top Union medals awarded by the EGU. In 2003 he was awarded the Centenary Medal by the Australian Government "for service to Australian Society in Hydrology and Environmental Engineering" and in January 2012, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. In 2018 he received, jointly with Professor Guenter Bloeschl of the Vienna University of Technology, the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (Creativity Prize) for his role in founding and growing the new field of socio-hydrology.