Prof. Rajagopalan Balaji is a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute of Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder. He was the former chair (2014–2022) of the department. He received his BTech in civil engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, India, in 1989, MTech in optimization and reliability engineering from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, in 1991, and a PhD in stochastic hydrology and hydroclimatology from Utah State University, Logan, in 1995. Following this, he worked as a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, NY, before joining the faculty of CEAE at CU, Boulder, where he was promoted to full professorship in 2010.
Prof. Balaji pursues research in diverse interdisciplinary areas spanning hydroclimatology, water resources management, Indian summer monsoon, paleoclimate, and stochastic hydrology. For his research contributing to the improved operations, management, and planning of water resources in the semiarid river basins of western USA, especially the Colorado River System, Prof. Balaji was a co-recipient of the Partners in Conservation Award from the Department of Interior in 2009. Besides, his joint work on unraveling the mystery of the Indian summer monsoon droughts which appeared in Science in 2006 was awarded the prestigious Norbert Gerbier Mumm Award from the World Meteorological Organization in 2009. In 2019, he was elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union..
Prof. Balaji has a strong publication record in peer-reviewed journals like Science, Nature Geoscience, and Geophysical Research Letters. He has also served as an associated editor of ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management and Geophysical Research Letters, and currently serves as an associate editor of Water Resources Research and Climate Research.
The socioeconomic health of India’s people and ecosystems is intricately tied to the pulse of its monsoonal climate and variability, but this is now under existential threat from climate change. The pressing need to understand the fingerprints of climate in natural and human systems to enable sustainable policies is motivating Prof. Balaji’s Fulbright-Kalam project. In this context, he is pursuing three research threads to understand and model the signatures of climate change and variability related to: hydroclimate extremes; water quality and public health; and the rise and fall of past societies in India and implications for future human migration.