MSI Fellow Efi Foufoula-Georgiou (Civil Engineering) has been named by President Barack Obama to serve on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. The Board is an independent agency whose purpose is to provide independent scientific and technical oversight to the DOE’s program for managing and disposing of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel. More information can be found in the University’s news release.
Professor Foufoula-Georgiou has been an MSI researcher for many years, and she has been an MSI Fellow since 1996. Her research group uses MSI resources to support their work studying precipitation and water systems. Using data received from a number of sources, the group is analyzing and modeling rainfall across large portions of the earth’s surface. The datasets for both the precipitation measurements and for geological features (river networks, channels, etc.) are very large, necessitating the use of powerful computing capabilities and parallel computational capacity. Professor Foufoula-Georgiou is on the faculty at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory and is the director of the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics.