Venkataramana Sridhar appointed assistant professor of biological systems engineering
Venkataramana Sridhar has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech.
He is one of 19 new faculty members that were recently hired in the university's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. New positions in the college were identified to bring new talent to its focus areas, including food and health, infectious disease, biodesign and processing, and agricultural profitability and environmental sustainability. The new faculty members are distributed across teaching, research, and Extension.
Sridhar received a bachelor's degree in agricultural engineering from India's Tamil Nadu University in 1991, a master's degree in irrigation engineering from the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand in 1994, and a Ph.D. in biosystems engineering from Oklahoma State University in 2001.
His research seeks to develop a systems dynamics modeling framework to link the hydrologic streamflow forecasts with decision support tools to provide scenarios for water resources management to optimize the allocation for the competing demands of water systems used in irrigation, hydropower, ecological flows, and navigation.
His research examines climate change impact assessment at river basin scales, water management and decision support, as well as vegetation dynamics at the watershed, regional, and continental scale, and streamflow modeling, surface water-ground water interactions, and GIS and remote sensing applications in hydrology.
Prior to coming to Virginia Tech, Sridhar was an associate professor of civil engineering at Boise State University, a research assistant professor in geosciences at the University of Nebraska, and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Sridhar was a Boise State Teaching Scholar in 2009-2010 at the school's Center for Teaching and Learning and garnered more than $1.4 million in grant funding during his academic career there.
He is a life member of the Asian Association for Agricultural Engineering, and currently holds membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Water Resources Association, and was initiated into the Agricultural Engineering Honor Society, Alpha Epsilon, in 1998.
Written by Amy Loeffler.
