M. Reza Najafi

Associate Professor

PhD - Civil and Environmental Engineering, Portland State University, USA (2013)
MSc - Civil Engineering, K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Iran (2007)
BSc - Civil Engineering, Shahid Beheshti Univeristy, Iran (2004)


Academic Appointments

  • 2022-Present: Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Western University
  • 2017-2022: Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Western University
  • 2015-2017: Research Scientist, Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, University of Victoria, BC
  • 2016: Sessional Instructor, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Victoria, BC
  • 2013-2015: Postdoctoral Fellow, Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, University of Victoria, BC
  • 2013: Postdoctoral Researcher, Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University, USA
  • 2009-2013: Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Portland State University, USA

Water resources engineering has traditionally relied on stationarity assumption for the analysis, design and management of water resources systems. It is now widely recognized, however, that the planet’s climate, including its hydroclimate, is no longer stationary, in large measure due to anthropogenic influence on Earth’s climate. Najafi’s research team develops and integrates state-of-the-art statistical and process-based approaches to understand and predict the spatial and temporal variability of natural hazard risks under climate change. We quantify the contribution of anthropogenic factors and internal climate variability to changes in the historical and projected hydroclimatic extremes. Our group characterizes the interactions between hazards and infrastructure systems in space and time to assess the corresponding compounding and cascading risks. This will lead to the development of effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. Our interdisciplinary research contributes to the assessment of climate change impacts on extreme events, floods and droughts, climate model downscaling, multi-modelling, uncertainty quantification and communication, Bayesian inference, remote sensing, distributed hydrologic modelling and multivariate extremes.

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