Dr. Scott Steinschneider is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. His primary expertise is in statistical hydroclimatology, with two principal focus areas: (1) the characterization of hydroclimatic variability across space-time scales, and (2) the analysis of hydroclimate impacts in the water sector. His work has focused on water systems across the United States and globally and has been sponsored by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, New York Sea Grant, National Science Foundation, and US Department of Agriculture. He earned his BA in Mathematics from Tufts University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Prior to arriving at Cornell, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University.
Current Members
Christine Swanson earned her B.S. in Environmental Science with a minor in Data Analytics from Union College (Schenectady, NY) in June 2023. In the Fall of 2023, she joined the Steinschneider Group as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering; her research revolves around water resources management in the Great Lakes basin. Broadly, her research interests lie at the intersection of hydrology and data analytics. This interest stems from her undergraduate thesis on turbidity in NYC’s water supply system, where she was awarded Union’s A.M. Ghaly Geo Research prize for best research study and reporting of original results. Christine is also a Goldwater Scholar (2022), which is the preeminent undergraduate award for students pursuing careers in mathematics, natural sciences, and engineering. During her free time, she enjoys playing the clarinet and going hiking.
Madeline Allen is a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. She joined the Steinschneider Research Group in 2023 to explore questions related to analyzing the variability and predictability of hydroclimate processes. She completed her B.A. in Earth and Environmental Sciences and M.S. in Civil Engineering at Vanderbilt University under the guidance of Dr. Mark Abkowitz and Dr. David Furbish. Madeline’s research has spanned a variety of hydrology-related topics including assessing flood risk through a combination of hydrologic models, remote sensing, GIS, and agent-based modeling; her master’s thesis evaluated probabilistic versus deterministic descriptions of bed load sediment transport. She’s particularly interested in quantifying uncertainty in hydroclimate forecasts at various spatial and temporal scales and collaborating with water management professionals to facilitate robust data-driven decision-making.
Sandeep Poudel is a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. He joined the Steinschneider Research Group in 2024 with an interest in advancing hydrologic modeling with computational techniques, AI, and stochastic methods for better management of water resources systems from future hydroclimatic risks. Before this, Sandeep earned his BS in Civil Engineering from the Institute of Engineering-Pulchowk Nepal, and an MS in Water Resources from the University of Connecticut. During his MS, he developed socio-hydrological models to study the relationships between flooding events, the National Flood Insurance Program, and the housing market across Coastal United States. He also assessed how these relationships might shift under climate change scenarios. He was recognized for this work with a graduate student research and creativity award. Sandeep also has experience working on the hydrologic and hydraulic design of water supply and hydropower projects at a consulting company in Nepal. For more information, please visit: https://snpoudel.github.io/
Rohini Gupta is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Steinschneider Lab. She completed her B.S in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017 and her M.S. (2019) and Ph.D (2024) at Cornell University in Reed Research Group. Her research interests center around robust operations and decision making in water resources planning and management. Her PhD was focused on developing tree-ring based reconstructions of weather regime dynamics to create hydroclimate scenarios that more fully capture natural hydroclimate variability in California over the past 600 years and explored how hydroclimate extremes propagate through California’s complex water system down to individual users. As a postdoc, Rohini will work on better resolving historical estimates of lake levels of the Great Lakes to inform water management in the region under a changing climate.
Zachary Brodeur received his B.S. in Environmental Engineering with a Minor in Chinese from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 2005 and an M.S. in Aeronautical Science from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2013. He completed 13 years of active-duty service in the U.S. Air Force in 2018, finishing his career at the rank of Major as an F-16 instructor pilot. He joined the Steinschneider group in the same year to pursue a M.S./Ph.D. in Biological and Environmental Engineering with broad interests in understanding how climate change and other anthropogenic forcing mechanisms will influence future human-environment interactions in the water resource domain. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, biking, woodworking and hiking, among other things.
Nasser Najibi is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Steinschneider Lab at Cornell University. He investigates hydroclimatic dynamics and weather regimes with their influences on regional hydrology and reservoir operations conditional on changing climate systems, land-atmosphere interactions, and extreme perturbations of the Earth system components. In particular, he works towards developing physically-based statistical models for climate impact assessments of water systems and the integration of process-based insights into the ensemble-based frameworks. Prior to this, he received his M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from The City College of New York, City University of New York (New York, USA) in 2017 and 2019, respectively. He has also received his M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees, respectively, from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (China) and the University of Tehran (Iran) in 2014 and 2011. For more information, please visit https://nassernajibi.com/
Dr. Sungwook Wi is a research associate in the Steinschneider Research Group within the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intersection between hydrologic, climatic, and anthropogenic systems with an emphasis on sustainable water resources development. He specializes in developing human-hydrologic systems models and applying the models to assess the impact of climate change/variability as well as human activities on water resources planning and management. His expertise in hydrology has played a critical role in addressing water issues for various watershed systems all over the world, including the USA, Mexico, Africa, East Asia, and Himalayan regions. Recently, Dr. Wi’s research has focused on harnessing AI/ML to better integrate Earth observations into hydrologic predictions.
Past Members
Kyla Semmendinger completed her B.S. in Environmental Engineering with minors in Spanish, Chemistry, and Engineering for Development from Mercer University (Macon, Georgia) in 2018. Her research interest focuses on coupling flood risk prediction with community engagement to maximize flood resiliency in vulnerable shoreline communities. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering in 2023, and afterwards took a postdoc position with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.
Swatah Snigdha Borkotoky completed his bachelors in Civil Engineering from the National Institute of Technology – Warangal, India in 2017. For one year he worked as a Project Technical Assistant under Prof. Subimal Ghosh at the Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay at the Hydroclimatology lab. His project focus was on statistical post-processing of Extended Range Forecast of the Indian Summer Monsoon. Previously he was a Summer Student Intern at the Columbia Water Center, Columbia University in 2016, where he was guided by Prof. Upmanu Lall. His research focus is on understanding plaeoclimate variability and possible reconstruction in the western United States. He completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering in 2023, and afterwards took a postdoc position at the University of Virginia.
Kenji Doering completed his B.S. in Biophysics with Minors in Chemistry and Mathematics at the University of Washington in 2014. He continued his work at a lab studying Nanopore DNA Sequencing until 2016 when he began his M.S./ Ph.D. at Cornell University, being co-advised by Profs. Lindsay Anderson and Scott Steinschneider. His doctoral degree focused on long-term climate variability and its impacts on renewable energy generation and power systems. After receiving his doctorate, Kenji became a postdoctoral research associate working with the New York State Water Resource Institute (NYS WRI).
Kezhen (Jenny) Wang completed her M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Davis, where she focused on characterizing sediment transport processes using a 1D watershed model. She received a Ph.D. in Biological and Environmental Engineering as a member of the Steinschneider Research Group, focusing on sediment transport dynamics and water resources system engineering. After receiving her doctorate, Jenny became a postdoctoral research associate working with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP).
Elizabeth Carter received her BS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2009 and her MSc in Environmental Information Science from Cornell University in 2015, modeling response of large-scale cropping systems to climate variability. She received a Ph.D. in Biological and Environmental Engineering as a member of the Steinschneider Research Group, and afterwards took a position as an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University.
Sudarshana Mukhopadhyay is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Steinschneider Lab at Cornell University. Her primary research area is statistical hydrology with an emphasis on stochastic hydrological modeling that aims at efficiently using climate information in water resources management. She is interested in river-basin scale multi-reservoir modeling for understanding water-energy nexus using probabilistic hydroclimatological forecasts and identifying the drivers of hydroclimatic variability across different spatial and temporal scale. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering with specialization in Climate, Hydrology and Water Resources modeling in Spring, 2020 from North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC). Sudarshana is a former USGS Global Change Fellow of Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, a former Graduate Visitor Fellow at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and a former DAAD Fellow. For more information, please visit https://sudarshana.wordpress.ncsu.edu/
Elnaz Kabir was a postdoctoral associate in the Steinschneider lab focusing on the nexus between clean energy transitions and climate variability. Prior to joining Cornell, she received a PhD in Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her broader research interests include the usage and creation of online and offline data-driven methods to make better predictions in power systems management. Elnaz recently joined the faculty at Texas A&M as a new Assistant Professor.
Scott Worland is currently the director of data science at FreightWaves and is responsible for designing end-to-end machine learning frameworks to improve near-time analytics in the freight market. Previously, Scott was a postdoctoral researcher in the Steinschneider Lab and an employee of the U.S. Geological Survey who applied statistical-learning methods to answer pressing earth-science questions. His previous research involved estimating streamflow in ungaged catchments using advanced machine-learning and statistics. He completed his PhD at Vanderbilt University in environmental engineering in May 2018.
Dr. Munir Ahmad Nayak is an Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology at Indore . Prior to doing a postdoc in the Steinschneider Lab, he earned a Ph.D. degree in Hydroscience and Water Resources Engineering from the University of Iowa, and three master’s degrees in the fields of Water Resources Engineering, Environmental Water Resources Systems, and Statistics. His research has focused on understanding climate impacts on hydrology and water resources, particularly extreme precipitation events, floods and droughts. He is particularly interested in finding innovative ways for water resources management and optimization of water resources systems under uncertain future, especially in water-stressed regions. In his doctoral thesis, he comprehensively evaluated the impact of climate process called Atmospheric Rivers (ARs)—long and narrow regions in the lower troposphere characterized high water vapor transport—on the extreme precipitation and flood frequency over the central United States. He has also worked on understanding global drought characteristics in future climate scenarios. For publications, see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DdXWqnUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao.
Dr. Kuk-Hyun Ahn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at KongJu National University. Prior to doing a postdoc in the Steinschneider Lab, Kuk-Hyun received his Ph.D. in Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette in Fall 2014, and was a postdoctoral research scientist in the Northeast Climate Science Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His primary research area is in the analysis and prediction of hydrologic systems to provide decision-centric information for the sustainable design and management of integrated water resource systems.
Jillian Foley completed her B.S. in Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. She then earned her M.Eng., working with Dr. Steinschneider on flood risk management in the Lake Ontario basin.
Ashley Sissel completed her B.E. in Environmental Engineering at Dartmouth. She then earned her M.Eng., working with Dr. Steinschneider on wetland restoration and water level management in the Lake Ontario basin.
Wang Fu completed his B.S. in Hydraulic Engineering with a minor in Computer Science at Tsinghua University, China in 2014. Then he began his Ph.D. in the State Key Lab. of Hydroscience and Engineering at Tsinghua University still. From Sep. 2017 to Jun. 2018, Wang was at Cornell University as a visiting student advised by Dr. Steinschneider, mainly studying the effect of ENSO and other teleconnections on regional precipitation. His research interest is in hydrology, machine learning, and particularly, some promising combinations of these two areas.
(Most of) The Group!
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