Auroop R. Ganguly

Auroop Ganguly is a civil and environmental engineer who works at the intersection of three broad areas: (1) Climate Extremes and Water Sustainability, (2) Infrastructural Resilience and Homeland Security, and (3) Artificial Intelligence and Nonlinear Dynamics. Ganguly directs the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab) at Northeastern University, where he develops novel and actionable predictive understanding of climate and hydrological extremes as well as lifeline infrastructure networks based on hybrid physics-based models and data driven methods, which in turn draw from artificial intelligence and machine learning, time series and spatial or spatiotemporal statistics, nonlinear dynamics and network sciences, as well as optimization and econometrics. The SDS Lab aspires to develop fundamental hydrology and climate science understanding, innovate in resilience engineering principles, and develop novel technologies and methods that leverage the power of data, computation, and physics. Multidisciplinary domains such as weather extremes impacts on urban lifelines and interdisciplinary solutions such as physics-guided data sciences are among the focal areas.

Prior to his current position at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, he was at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory for seven years in their Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, at Oracle Corporation for five years in their Time Series and Demand Forecasting groups, and at a startup subsequently acquired by Oracle for a year. In addition, he has a dual interest in ancient history and science fiction, i.e., the forgotten past and the unknown future. While he has nothing particularly against the here and now, he rarely gets any time to spend there and then. Once upon a time he obtained a PhD from MIT, and currently, other than his day job as the Principal Investigator of the SDS Lab at Northeastern, he takes a bunch of undergraduate kids abroad to study climate change science and policy, and happens to be the Chief Scientific Adviser for a startup co-founded with one of his former PhD students. Ganguly is particularly proud of the success of his students and research mentees in the private industry, government research and academia, and the recognition they receive. Thus, three of his current PhD students recently won back-to-back awards in machine learning (Vandal), urban climate (Jalalzadeh-Fard), and infrastructure resilience (Bhatia), while his former PhD students, post-MS, and postdoctoral associates are in faculty positions, research scientists at National Labs, a CEO of a startup, a director of a large insurance company, a holder of a top international fellowship, as well as risk analysts, climate modelers, and machine learning researchers at diverse, multinational companies.