IWP’s Senior Research Fellow Robert Wasson has been awarded the Indian National Science Academy’s Dr. Vikram Sarabhai Chair Fellowship. With this award, Dr Wasson will travel to India in 2017 to work with research and policy groups in Delhi, Ahmedabad and Dehra Dun on flood disasters and water resource issues more generally.
During his time in India, Dr Wasson will brainstorm with Indian scientists the implications of long flood histories and seek to develop an improved understanding of flood risk in the Himalaya.
He will also work to identify optimal system dynamics models of the interactions of flood threats with human behavior, including cascading disasters where a flood leads to other impacts such as economic losses and development setbacks.
This work continues and further deepens Dr Wasson’s long history of collaboration with India’s Physical Research Laboratory.
Dr Wasson’s holistic approach to flood threat analysis differs from current methods, which rely entirely on statistical modelling of gauged records of floods spanning short duration of instrumental records.