Venkataraman “Venkat” Lakshmi, the John L. Newcomb Professor of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy. Fellow is the highest recognition the society bestows.
Fellowship in the American Society of Agronomy is reserved for up to 3% of the Society’s active and emeritus members, with fewer than 12 selections in 2023. Members of the society nominate worthy colleagues based on their records of outstanding contributions to agronomy through education, national and international service, and research.
Lakshmi is an international authority on studies of hydrological extremes using in-place and remote-sensing data collection and modeling to make observations about the terrestrial water cycle and to better understand weather, climate and ecology.
His areas of research interest include catchment hydrology, or the study of how water interacts with the Earth’s drainage basins; validating and analyzing hydrology data via satellite; field experiments; land-atmosphere interactions; the vadose zone, meaning the area extending from Earth’s ground surface to the water table; and water resources.
An active member of numerous professional societies, Lakshmi is the current president-elect of the Hydrology Section of the American Geophysical Union, a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Society of Civil Engineers, and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
A Record of Service in the Hydrology Research Community
Lakshmi has provided leadership as program director for Hydrologic Sciences at the National Science Foundation (2017-2018), currently serves on the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the Earth Science Advisory Committee for NASA. He also is the handling editor for the Soil Science Society of America’s Vadose Zone Journal and founding editor-in-chief of Remote Sensing in Earth System Science, a publication of Springer Nature.
Lakshmi received his B.S. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Since joining the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty in January 2019, his work has been cited more than 5,200 times according to Google Scholar, and he is on pace to match or exceed his 1,323 citations in 2022.
He is also active in a community of researchers at UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and the UVA College of Arts & Sciences addressing environmental challenges, including the Link Lab for cyber-physical systems research.
From 2019-2022, Lakshmi served as a senator and chair of the UVA Engineering Faculty Council and from 2019 to 2022 on the Promotions and Tenure Committee, which he chaired from 2021-2022.