Ankit Agarwal

NH Natural Hazards

The 2023 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Ankit Agarwal for his distinguished work in complexity science for better understanding, quantifying and predicting hydroclimatic extremes.

Ankit Agarwal is an outstanding researcher and young professor working on hydro-meteorological (compound) extremes and complex networks. He is a civil engineer with a Masters in Water Resource Engineering. In 2019, he obtained his PhD in Hydrology from the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geoscience, University of Potsdam, Germany. Since 2019 he has been an Assistant Professor at the Department of Hydrology, at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India.

Even though he is a young researcher, Ankit Agarwal has a rich scientific work which is centered on complexity science for better understanding, quantifying and predicting hydroclimatic extremes, related to Natural Hazards. He has been playing a pioneering role in merging nonlinear dynamics with hydrometeorology to understand the space-time dynamics of coupled systems and to better forecast climate-related extremes. In the center of his distinguished work on multi-scale Complex Network approaches, is the development of innovative methods for quantifying hydro-climatic interactions at different time scales, that allow for insights into the importance of multiscale interactions within hydro-climatology. Ankit Agarwal has also been remarkably active in managing international cooperation projects, as well as collaborations with industry.

Because of this the 2023 Natural Hazards Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is presented to Ankit Agarwal for his solid philosophy as a researcher and as a student-centered professor, who incorporates a strong motivation to bring science to less privileged researchers worldwide, towards creating equal opportunities.