Professor Sorooshian Honored by his Alma Mater

UC Irvine Distinguished Professor Soroosh Sorooshian has been selected as an inaugural recipient of UCLA’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Distinguished Alumnus Award.

An internationally recognized expert in water resources engineering, Sorooshian is the director of the Samueli School of Engineering’s Center for Hydrometeorology & Remote Sensing and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

The UCLA citation states: “Sorooshian has made a significant and major impact on the research areas of watershed modeling, parameter estimation, hydro-climatic modeling, and application of remote sensing to hydrology.  He developed optimization methods for parameter estimation for physically-based watershed models in general and the Sacramento model in particular. Sorooshian’s pioneering and ground-breaking work on combining global optimization with maximum likelihood estimation to overcome the inherent difficulties in parameter estimation is well recognized. The methodology that he developed has been adopted by the U.S. Weather Service into its river-forecast system. Clearly, Professor Sorooshian has established himself as a nationally and internationally renowned scholar/research and leader in the field of hydrology. His accomplishments and contributions to research and the profession have been well recognized.”

Sorooshian most recently received the 2013 AGU Robert E. Horton Medal, the highest honor in the field of hydrology. “I have had the fortune of receiving a number of honors and prestigious recognitions over my career,” he says, “but none have given me more pleasure and a sense of gratitude as being recognized by my Alma Mater.”