Auroop R. Ganguly
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Director, Sustainability & Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab)
Professor (by courtesy), Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Professor (by courtesy), Marine and Environmental Science
Professor (by courtesy), Political Science
Professor (by courtesy), School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Chief Scientist, Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division, Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate, US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA
Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Adviser, risQ Inc.
Contact
- a.ganguly@northeastern.edu
- Snell Engineering 400
360 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Social Media
Office
- Room 475, Snell Engineering
- 617-373-3710 (email preferred)
Lab
- 216 Mass Ave, Boston, MA 02115 (virtual: sdslab.io)
- 617-373-6005 (email preferred)
Research Focus
Geoscience (Climate Science, Hydrology, Hydrometeorology); Engineering (Infrastructure Resilience, Water Resources, Lifeline Systems); Data Sciences (Machine Learning, Data Mining, Nonlinear Physics)
About
Auroop R. Ganguly is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, where he has affiliate appointments with the Khoury College of Computer Science and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. His research intersects weather and hydrologic extremes under climate change, lifeline infrastructures resilience under compound extremes, as well as machine learning and nonlinear physics. He has a joint role as a Chief Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Ganguly co-founded the Boston-based climate analytics startup risQ. Prior to Northeastern, Ganguly worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a research institute of the US Department of Energy, and at Oracle Corporation, along with a best-of-breed called Demantra Inc. which was subsequently acquired by Oracle. He has been in review panels of the United Nations (UN) Environmental Programme and other US and global agencies, his work has been cited by the UN and US intergovernmental and national reports, and he has delivered invited/keynote talks at workshops organized by the US National Academies and NSF. Ganguly is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) as well as a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and obtained a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Education
- Ph.D., Civil & Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2002
- M.S., Civil Engineering, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, 1997
- B.Tech., Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, 1993
Honors & Awards
Ganguly has published in interdisciplinary journals such as Nature, Nature Climate Change, PNAS, PLOS One, Nature’s Scientific Reports, won best paper awards in highly selective machine learning or AI conferences such as ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data mining (KDD) and SIAM Data Mining (SDM), best poster awards at AGU (American Geophysical Union) and AMS (American Meteorological Society) meetings, published a textbook on Critical Infrastructures Resilience and an edited book on Knowledge Diacovery from Sensor Data, produced papers in top disciplinary journals spanning areas such as geosciences, infrastructures, climate, water, information theory and data science, developed US patents in climate risks and infrastructures resilience, and co-founded a climate analytics startup. Prior to his role as a professor at Northeastern University, Ganguly was a senior scientist at US DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the computational science and engineering division, where he helped define their knowledge discovery theme and won several awards for significant research contributions and outstanding mentorship. He has led or co-led funded research projects worth about ~$30 Million in his independent research career. Before Northeastern and ORNL, Ganguly was the product manager of Demand Planning at Oracle Corporation, and a senior product manager of Analytics and Strategy at Demantra Inc., which in turn was subsequently acquired by Oracle. Ganguly considers his biggest accomplishment to be the success of his current and former students, postdocs and visiting professors, who range from scientists at federal agencies and national laboratories like NASA and ORNL, leaders in the private industry including the CEO of a successful startup, as well as successful and award-winning global academics at places like the Indian Institute of Technology campuses.
NSF News & Highlights
- 2016: Nature & Nature Climate Change papers
- 2015: Nature Paper: climate change & coastal upwelling
- 2014: Climate change research goes to the extremes
- 2012: ScienceLives Interview
- 2012: NSF Newsletter (pg. 3: “Faces of NSF Research”)
- 2011: Nature Climate Change: Indian rainfall extremes
Teaching Interests
- CIVE 3464 (Undergraduate): Probability and Engineering Economy for Engineers (Spring, Fall)
- CIVE 5363 (Undergraduate/Graduate): Climate Science, Engineering Adaptation, and Policy (Spring, Fall)
- CIVE 7100 (Graduate): Applied Time Series and Spatial Statistics (Spring)
- CIVE 7110 (Graduate): Critical Infrastructure Resilience (Fall)
- CIVE 4777 & CIVE 4778 (Undergraduate): Climate Change Science and Policy Abroad (Summer)
Leadership Positions
Appointments: Private Industry and Government
- (Joint) Chief Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, 2020-Now
- Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Adviser, risQ Corp., Cambridge, MA, 2016-Now
- Senior Scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 2004-2011
- Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer, AnalyticsSmart Inc., Tampa, FL, 2003-2004
- Senior Product Manager, Demantra Inc., (Acquired by Oracle) Waltham, MA, 2003
- Product Manager of Demand Planning, Burlington, MA, and Time Series Software Developer, Nashua, NH, Oracle Corporation, 1998-2003
Appointments: US Academia
- Professor, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 2011-Now
- Joint Faculty (with ORNL), University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2006-2011
- Visiting Faculty, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 2003-2004
Appointments: Indian Academia
- Guest Professor, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India, 2021-Now
- International Visiting Professor, Computer Science and Environmental Science, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, 2018-2021
- Visiting Professor, Interdisciplinary Program on Climate, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India, 2013-2015
Professional Affiliations
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- American Meteorological Society (AMS)
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Research Overview
Geoscience (Climate Science, Hydrology, Hydrometeorology); Engineering (Infrastructure Resilience, Water Resources, Lifeline Systems); Data Sciences (Machine Learning, Data Mining, Nonlinear Physics)
Ganguly’s research domains include urban sustainability (e.g., initial ~25 min of this National Academies presentation) and climate change (e.g., this NSF news and this Nature highlight), as well as spatiotemporal machine learning (e.g., see Fig 2b of this Nature Perspective and this Nature commentary) and network science for lifeline infrastructure (e.g., this DoD SERDP video).
Sustainability & Data Sciences Laboratory
Our focus has been on understanding the science of climate extremes and uncertainty, translation to impacts with a particular focus on the water sector, and informing policy in the context of adaptation and mitigation. Our approaches blend interdisciplinary data sciences with physical process understanding from climate model simulations and remote or in-situ sensor-based observations.
Selected Research Projects
- Suite of “Experiential PhD” projects (NASA, ORNL, PNNL, risQ, others): The SDS Lab provides a relativelty unique opportunity to PhD students and postdoctoral associates to work closely with our collaborators (including SDS Lab alums) at NASA Ames, US DOE Labs such as ORNL and PNNL, as well as the private sector including startups such as the SDS Lab spinout risQ. The SDS Lab students or postdocs on these experiential projects often end up spending substantial time on-site at the federal agencies (e.g., NASA), national labs (e.g., ORNL and PNNL), and the private sector (e.g., risQ) and are usually also funded by them at Northeastern. The students and postdocs have often been absorbed into these or related organizations post-graduation depending on interests.
- CRISP Type 2: Interdependent Network-based Quantification of Infrastructure Resilience (INQUIRE)
Co-Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation - CyberSEES: Type 2: SEA-MASCOT: Spatio-temporal Extremes and Associations : Marine Adaptation and Survivorship under Changes in extreme Ocean Temperatures
Co-Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation - NICE: Networked Infrastructures under Compound Extremes
Principal Investigator, Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research & Development Program - Multigraph Theeory for National Critical Functions
Co-Principal Investigator, Department of Homeland Security (via joint Chief Scientist role at US DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Research Centers and Institutes
NSF Expeditions in Computing (graduated)
Northeastern Global Resilience Institute
Twenty-Five Selected Publications (led by Ganguly and/or his students/postdocs)
- Ganguly, A.R. and colleagues, 2021. Science-integrated Artificial-intelligence for Flooding and precipitation Extremes (SAFE) (No. AI4ESP1047). AI4ESP: White Paper, US DOE BER Call. AI4ESP and US DOE.
- Kodra, E.*, Bhatia, U.*, Chatterjee, S., Chen, S.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2020. Physics-guided probabilistic modeling of extreme precipitation under climate change. Scientific Reports, 10, 10299.
- Yadav, N.*, Chatterjee, S. and Ganguly, A.R., 2020. Resilience of urban transport network-of-networks under intense flood hazards exacerbated by targeted attacks. Scientific Reports, 10, 10350.
- Konduri, V.S.*, Kumar, J., Hargrove, W.W., Hoffman, F.M. and Ganguly, A.R., 2020. Mapping crops within the growing season across the United States. Remote Sensing of Environment, 251, 112048.
- Bhatia, U.*, Sela, L. and Ganguly, A.R., 2020. Hybrid method of recovery: combining topology and optimization for transportation systems. Journal of Infrastructure Systems, 26(3), 04020024.
- Bhatia, U.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2019. Precipitation extremes and depth-duration-frequency under internal climate variability. Scientific Reports, 9, 9112.
- Duffy, K.*, Vandal, T.*, Li, S., Ganguly, S., Nemani, R. and Ganguly, A.R., 2019. DeepEmSat: Deep Emulation for Satellite Data Mining. Frontiers in Big Data, 2, 42.
- Kumar, D.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2018. Intercomparison of model response and internal variability across climate model ensembles. Climate Dynamics, 51(1), 207-219.
- Clark, K.L.*, Bhatia, U.*, Kodra, E.A.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2018. Resilience of the US national airspace system airport network. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 19(12), 3785-3794.
- Vandal, T.*, Kodra, E.*, Dy, J., Ganguly, S., Nemani, R. and Ganguly, A.R., 2018, July. Quantifying uncertainty in discrete-continuous and skewed data with Bayesian deep learning. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (2377-2386).
- Vandal, T.*, Kodra, E.*, Ganguly, S., Michaelis, A., Nemani, R. and Ganguly, A.R., 2017, August. DeepSD: Generating high resolution climate change projections through single image super-resolution. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (1663-1672).
- Ganguli, P.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2016. Space-time trends in US meteorological droughts. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, 8, 235-259.
- Ganguli, P.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2016. Robustness of meteorological droughts in dynamically downscaled climate simulations. JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 52(1), 138-167.
- Wang, D.*, Gouhier, T.C., Menge, B.A. and Ganguly, A.R., 2015. Intensification and spatial homogenization of coastal upwelling under climate change. Nature, 518(7539), 390-394.
- Bhatia, U.*, Kumar, D.*, Kodra, E.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2015. Network science based quantification of resilience demonstrated on the Indian Railways Network. PLOS ONE, 10(11), e0141890.
- Kodra, E.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2014. Asymmetry of projected increases in extreme temperature distributions. Scientific Reports, 4, 5884.
- Kumar, D.*, Kodra, E.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2014. Regional and seasonal intercomparison of CMIP3 and CMIP5 climate model ensembles for temperature and precipitation. Climate Dynamics, 43(9-10), 2491-2518.
- Steinhaeuser, K.*, Ganguly, A.R. and Chawla, N.V., 2012. Multivariate and multiscale dependence in the global climate system revealed through complex networks. Climate Dynamics, 39(3-4), 889-895.
- Kao, S.C.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2011. Intensity, duration, and frequency of precipitation extremes under 21st‐century warming scenarios. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 116(D16).
- Kodra, E.*, Steinhaeuser, K.* and Ganguly, A.R., 2011. Persisting cold extremes under 21st‐century warming scenarios. Geophysical Research Letters, 38(8).
- Steinhaeuser, K.*, Chawla, N.V. and Ganguly, A.R., 2011. Complex networks as a unified framework for descriptive analysis and predictive modeling in climate science. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining: The ASA Data Science Journal, 4(5), 497-511.
- Ganguly, A.R., Steinhaeuser, K.*, Erickson, D.J., Branstetter, M., Parish, E.S., Singh, N., Drake, J.B. and Buja, L., 2009. Higher trends but larger uncertainty and geographic variability in 21st century temperature and heat waves. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15555-15559.
- Khan, S.*, Bandyopadhyay, S., Ganguly, A.R., Saigal, S., Erickson III, D.J., Protopopescu, V. and Ostrouchov, G., 2007. Relative performance of mutual information estimation methods for quantifying the dependence among short and noisy data. Physical Review E, 76(2), 026209.
- Kuhn, G.*, Khan, S.*, Ganguly, A.R. and Branstetter, M.L., 2007. Geospatial–temporal dependence among weekly precipitation extremes with applications to observations and climate model simulations in South America. Advances in Water Resources, 30(12), 2401-2423.
- Khan, S.*, Kuhn, G.*, Ganguly, A.R., Erickson III, D.J. and Ostrouchov, G., 2007. Spatio‐temporal variability of daily and weekly precipitation extremes in South America. Water Resources Research, 43(11).
Oct 19, 2021
Experiential PhD Spotlight with Nishant Yadav
Nishant Yadav, PhD interdisciplinary engineering student, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, participated in the Experiential PhD program. His research is in applying machine learning and AI to solving problems in climate and the environment. He joined CEE’s Sustainability and Data Sciences Lab at Northeastern under Professor Auroop Ganguly, and then worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, then NASA Ames Research Center, and is now starting work at Hitachi AI Labs.
Oct 12, 2021
Climate Challenge: Latinos disproportionately impacted by wildfires
CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly’s risQ climate startup, with CEO Even Kodra, PhD’14, interdisciplinary engineering, and a former member of Ganguly’s SDS Lab, was featured in an NBC news article on Latinos Disproportionately Impacted by Wildfires. View around 0:30 to around 0:50, and at around 0:40 to around 0:50 of the video.
Jun 07, 2021
Summer 2021 PEAK Experiences Awardees
Congratulations to the COE student recipients of the Summer 2021 PEAK Experiences Awards. The PEAK Experiences Awards are a progressively structured sequence of opportunities designed to support learners as they continue climbing to new heights of achievement in undergraduate research and creative endeavor throughout their Northeastern journeys. BASE CAMP AWARDS Ana Salichs, E’22, “Colorimetric Assays […]
Mar 22, 2021
Onto NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
“Interdisciplinarity.” That’s what drew PhD candidate Venkata Shashank Konduri to Northeastern. Konduri is pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Engineering, meaning he is taking coursework from different disciplines and performing valuable research on complicated, multi-subject problems. “During the course of my PhD, I took classes from various departments like civil engineering, marine science, policy, and electrical […]
Nov 25, 2020
Northeastern University: A Valuable Partner for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly was recently appointed as Chief Scientist of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)’s Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division, Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate. The new partnership between Northeastern University and PNNL focuses on urban resilience and security.
Aug 10, 2020
Cloud Physics Conundrum: Finetuning Climate Models Using Machine Learning
CEE PhD student Nishant Yadav won the Best Student Paper Award by the AI Foundation For Good’s Fragile Earth Workshop for his paper “Machine Learning for Robust Identification of Complex Nonlinear Dynamical Systems: Applications to Earth Systems Modeling.”
Jul 21, 2020
The 2020 Virtual Dialogue of Civilizations Program on Climate Change Science and Policy
While CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly was unable to travel with his Dialogue of Civilizations students to Tanzania, he was able to provide a unique and interdisciplinary experience for his students, one quite unlike a typical virtual course.
Jun 29, 2020
CEE Alumni Spotlight: Physics-guided Probabilistic Modeling of Extreme Precipitation Under Climate Change
In a newly released paper, published in Scientific Reports, CEE alumni Drs. Udit Bhatia and Evan Kodra examine new methods for improving earth systems models.
Jun 01, 2020
Practical Tools to Recover from Network Disruption
CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly was awarded a patent for creating a “System for networking and analyzing geospatial data, human infrastructure, and natural elements.”
May 28, 2020
Ganguly to Lead $3M SERDP Grant for Networked Infrastructures under Compound Extremes
CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly is the lead PI on a $3M grant for “NICE: Networked Infrastructures under Compound Extremes” from the DoD’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP).