Auroop Ganguly

College of Engineering Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Director, SDS Lab

Auroop R. Ganguly is a Professor of Engineering at Northeastern University and the Director of their SDS Lab in Boston, MA, and a joint appointee at the US DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA, where he is a Chief Scientist. He was the Chief Scientific Advisor and a co-founder of the urban climate analytics startup risQ, which has been recently acquired by a Fortune 500 company and currently serves as an adviser to the Zeus AI, a machine learning based satellite data driven weather forecasting startup. Prior to Northeastern, he has been employed at Oracle Corporation, a best-of-breed called Demantra Inc. that was subsequently acquired by Oracle, and the US DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Ganguly’s research intersects climate extremes and infrastructural resilience, as well as data science, specifically, nonlinear dynamics and machine learning. Within data science, he is intrigued by the challenges of integrating physics with data-driven sciences, and by the Big and small data challenges in sciences and engineering. Ganguly has published in peer reviewed journals in climate and the geosciences, including in interdisciplinary venues such as Nature, Nature Climate Change, and PNAS, as well as in engineering, nonlinear physics, and data science journals, and also in highly-selective computer science conferences such as ACM KDD and SIAM, where he and his students have received best paper awards, and has published a textbook on Critical Infrastructure Resilience and edited books on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data. His research has been cited by all three working groups in the most recent United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) and in both reports of the the latest United States (US) National Climate Assessment (NCA), and he has been invited to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) review panels on stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change. Ganguly led both the Artificial Intelligence (AI) section of the US Sustained National Climate Assessment (published as journal papers) and the Neural Networks section of the US DOE’s Artificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability (AI4ESP) report, as well as the Temperature Extremes section of the Boston Research Advisory Group (BRAG) report for Climate Ready Boston, and led the development of an award-winning risk assessment report under the aegis of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX) for the Town of Brookline, MA. Ganguly’s former PhD students, postdocs, and mentees are or have been employed in federal agencies and government laboratories such as NASA and ORNL, internationally as faculty such as at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and in the private sector as key contributors and leaders in AI/ML (e.g., Microsoft Azure AI), risk analytics (e.g., Tokio Marine and AIR Worldwide), and insurance companies, and as co-founders of startups. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), senior member of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, USA. He has been widely quoted or interviewed by the national and global media, most recently by the New York Times, Newsweek, the National Geographic, and the Independent, among others, and previously by the mainstream media across all inhabited continents. Over the course of his independent research career, he has brought in, either a PI or a Co-PI or as a key contributor, about $60M funding from multiple federal agencies and other organizations.