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Initial News for New Alumni News App

Name: Rita Colwell

Title: Science During Crisis: New Report with Recommendations

Date: 19 March 2019

Link: https://www.amacad.org/news/science-during-crisis-new-report-recommendations

Name: Andre Geim

Title: Hall effect becomes viscous in graphene

Date: 28 February 2019

Link: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-02/uom-heb022719.php

Name: Jim W. Hall

Title: 'Now is the time to do bold things...' - UNISDR

Date: 19 March 2019

Link: https://www.unisdr.org/archive/64317


Prize film


Water Management & Protection Prize - 8th Award

Overview

Dr. Jim W. Hall and Dr. Edoardo Borgomeo (Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford).

Dr. Hall and Dr. Borgomeo have developed and applied a new risk-based framework to assess water security and plan water supply infrastructure in times of climate change. Their innovations include a simulation-based method for analysing the risk to public water supplies under non-stationary climate conditions, a new non-parametric technique for generating synthetic streamflow sequences for water resources systems assessments, a new method for simulating the impact of unprecedented droughts on public water supplies, and a process for identifying water security investments that meet an acceptable level of water-related risk. Their methods assist water managers in planning investments and policies to cope with the risks confronting their water systems. This has made them one of the most influential groups providing engineering and scientific advice for water resources planning and adaptation to climate risks in the UK and globally.

Winner Profiles

Dr. Jim W. Hall

Dr. Hall is Director of the Environmental Change Institute, Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks, fellow of Linacre College and a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Engineering Science in the University of Oxford.

Education:

• 2011 - MA by proclamation University of Oxford
• 1999 - PhD, “Uncertainty Management for Coastal Defence Systems” University of Bristol
• 1998 - Postgraduate Certificate in Engineering Management, Joint Board for Engineering Management
• 1990 - BEng in Civil Engineering, 1st class honours. University of Bristol

Selected Awards:

2016 - Lloyd’s Science of Risk Prize
2013 - Lloyd’s Science of Risk Prize
2004 - Robert Alfred Carr Prize, Institution of Civil Engineers
2001 - George Stephenson Medal, Institution of Civil Engineers
2001 - Frederick Palmer Prize, Institution of Civil Engineers

 

 

Dr. Edoardo Borgomeo

Dr. Borgomeo is advisor at the International Water Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Education:

• 2015 - PhD in Water Resources Management, University of Oxford
• 2012 - MSci, Environmental Geoscience, Imperial College London

Selected Awards:

2012 - Bennett H. Brough medal for excellence in mine surveying, Imperial College, London
2011 - Royal School of Mines Association Medal for the best essay on environmental issues in Earth Sciences

Acceptance Speech

unhq300x300 Honourable Secretary-General, Your Royal Highness, honoured colleagues, ladies and gentlemen:

It’s a great honor and inspiration to be awarded the 2018 Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz international prize for water management and protection.

First of all, I would like to thank the members of the jury and prize organizing committee for making this event possible and for recognizing our work.

Faced with pressures from rising populations, competing demands, water scarcity, climate change and limited budgets, water managers find it increasingly difficult to identify investments to cost-effectively secure water supplies.

We argue that in order to tackle these growing challenges water managers need to think about their job as a job of managing risks and not just water.

However, casting water management as risk management in a rapidly changing world is not an easy task. It means accounting for multiple and often competing needs for water, including agriculture, industry and people, and not forgetting the need to sustain the aquatic environment. These difficult trade-offs need to be navigated in a world of increasing uncertainty. Our approach to addressing these problems, like many hydrologists before us, is based on simulation modelling; so our work has built on that legacy to shown how climate, hydrological and water resource system models can be used to assess risks in uncertain changing conditions and identify strategies to manage risks affordably and fairly for different water users. The risk-based framework provides an explicit means of addressing the variability that is intrinsic to hydrological, ecological and socio-economic systems.

After having developed the framework, we applied it to London’s water supply system, to understand whether or not the city is likely to experience water shortages in the future. Britain is not a country one would think of as being particularly water scarce, but growing population and demand in the south-east of the country, and growing evidence of climate change now means that these risks are being taken very seriously… and rightly so: Our research shows that if no action is taken the city is indeed set to experience more frequent and severe water shortages in the future. Our research also shows that aggressive demand management to reduce consumption and losses in the distribution system is a priority to be implemented immediately. But reducing leaks may not be enough, and investments to augment supplies will be needed in the future. This work would have not been possible without the financial support from Thames Water and England’s environment agency, and the intellectual engagement of members of these organizations Dr Glenn Watts, Dr Chris Lambert and Dr Keith Colqouhun. In carrying out this part of the work, we also benefited from the collaboration with Dr Mohammad Mortazavi-Naeini, Dr Michael O’Sullivan and Dr Tim Watson, whose support we gratefully acknowledge.

-- Professor Jim W.Hall

 

unhq300x300 Honourable Secretary-General, Your Royal Highness, honoured colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

Our argument is that water managers need to manage risks. Yet, there are risks that we cannot estimate with the information we have today. The climate is changing past familiar bounds. We don’t know how severe future droughts will be or how frequently extreme storms will strike. This means that future water availability and needs will be significantly different from anything we imagined when we first built our water supply systems.

Given this level of uncertainty, we argue that our strategies to secure supplies not only need to make sense from a risk reduction and cost-effectiveness point of view, but also from a robustness point of view. Focusing on robustness means focusing on strategies that work reasonably well across a wide range of plausible scenarios, rather than being optimal over a narrow set of conditions.

Focusing on robustness also means accepting the unpredictability of some of the processes affecting our water supplies, and build infrastructure and choose investments that are cost-effective at reducing risks that we can calculate, but that can also handle the unpredictability we cannot estimate.

To help water managers find robust strategies, we applied the ever-expanding computing power at our disposal to analyze and visualize thousands to millions plausible scenarios of the future. We focused on scenarios of unprecedented drought and tested the performance of current and planned water supply infrastructure against thousands of drought events that were longer and more severe than historical droughts.

In the same way that a chemist synthesizes new molecules in the laboratory, we created synthetic droughts with advanced statistical and computational methods. Then we used simulation modelling to explore under which of these drought conditions water resources plans missed their targets. We applied this approach to help water managers in London identify and choose robust water supply strategies- in other words, strategies that give us security of supply across a range of unprecedented drought scenarios.

To carry out this work, we collaborated with Dr Chris Farmer from Oxford’s Mathematical Institute and Dr Stefan Hochrainer and Professor Georg Pflug from the International Institute for Applied System Analysis, whose intellectual contributions we gratefully acknowledge.

Our work on risk-based water resources planning has been developed and applied in England, but is, if anything, even more applicable in other parts of the world where the risks of water scarcity and climate change are greater. By providing a clear and transparent way of presenting evidence to inform decisions, we have used our framework to help water managers around the world identify investments to respond to pressing water scarcity challenges. More importantly, we have demonstrated that uncertainty about how much the climate is changing is not a reason to delay preparing for the harmful impacts of climate change. To conclude, let me thank again the members of the jury and prize organizing committee for making this event possible and for recognizing our work and let me thank my mentor Jim for opening the doors of water research to me.

-- Dr. Edoardo Borgomeo

Winning Work

[1] Hall, J.W. and Borgomeo, E. Risk-based principles for defining and managing water security, Phil. Trans. Royal Society, A 371 (2013): 20120407.

[2] Borgomeo, E., Hall, J.W., Fung, F., Watts, G., Colquhoun, K. and Lambert, C. Risk based water resources planning, incorporating probabilistic non-stationary climate uncertainties. Water Resources Research, 50 (2014): 6850–6873.

[3] Borgomeo, E., Farmer, C.L. and Hall, J.W. Numerical rivers: a synthetic streamflow generator for water resources vulnerability assessments, Water Resources Research, 51 (2015): 5382– 5405.

[4] Borgomeo, E., Pflug, G., Hall, J.W. and Hochrainer-Stigler, S., Assessing water resource system vulnerability to unprecedented hydrological drought using copulas to characterize drought duration and deficit, Water Resources Research, 51 (2015), 8927–8948.

[5] Borgomeo, E., Mortazavi-Naeini, M., O’Sullivan, M.J., Hall, J.W. and Watson, T. Trading-off tolerable risk with climate change adaptation costs in water supply systems. Water Resources Research, 52(2) (2016). DOI: 10.1002/2015WR018164.

Back to all 8th Award Winners


Alternative Water Resources Prize - 8th Award

Overview

Dr. Omar Yaghi (University of California, Berkeley) & Dr. Evelyn Wang (MIT).

Dr. Yaghi and Dr. Wang have invented a device using an innovative porous metal-organic framework (MOF) developed by Dr Yaghi that captures water from the atmosphere using natural sunlight. The device, which was constructed according to Dr. Yaghi’s vision with the assistance of a team at MIT led by Dr. Wang, is capable of harvesting 2.8 liters of water per kilogram of MOF daily at relative humidity levels as low as 20%, operating passively without any power input, aside from ambient sunlight at a flux of less than 1 sun (1 kilowatt per square meter). The ease with which MOFs can be designed, made, and modified by Yaghi bodes well for their commercialization and widespread use for water harvesting.

Winner Profiles

Dr. Omar Yaghi

Dr. Yaghi is the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry, University of California-Berkeley and Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also Co-Director of both the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute and the California Research Alliance by BASF at UC Berkeley. He is the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, College of Chemistry, UC Berkeley, Director of the joint King Abdulaziz Center for Science and Technology-UC Berkeley collaborative science center, and Director of the Carbon Capture and Conversion Research Group at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia.

Education:

• 1990 - Ph.D., Chemistry, Best Thesis Award, University of Illinois-Urbana, Illinois.
• 1985 - B.S., Chemistry, Cum Laude; State University of New York-Albany, New York.

Selected Awards:

2017 - Kuwait Prize in Basic Sciences, Kuwait
2017 - Albert Einstein World Award of Science, World Cultural Council
2017 - Star of Science Award, Jordan
2017 - Japan Society of Coordination Chemistry International Award, Japan
2017 - King Abdullah II Order of Distinction of the First Class, Jordan
2017 - Royal Society of Chemistry Spiers Memorial Award, United Kingdom
2017 - Bailar Medal, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
2016 - TÜBA Academy Prize in Basic and Engineering Sciences, Turkey
2016 - Mack Award, Ohio State University, United States
2015 - Mustafa Prize in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Iran
2015 - UNICAM Award, University of Camerino, Italy
2015 - King Faisal International Prize in Science, Saudi Arabia
2013 - China Nano Award, China
2012 - World Class Talent 1000 Professorship, Beijing Institute of Technology, China
2011 - Top 2 most cited chemist worldwide, ISI Thomson 2001-present
2010 - Royal Society of Chemistry Centenary Prize, United Kingdom
2009 - World Class Professor, KAIST, South Korea
2009 - Izatt-Christensen International Award in Macrocyclic Chemistry, United States
2009 - American Chemical Society Award in the Chemistry of Materials, United States
2008 - AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, United States
2007 - Materials Research Society Medal Sole Recipient, United States
2007 - Deans Recognition Award, UCLA, United States
2007 - DOE Hydrogen Program R&D Award for Outstanding Achievements, United States
2006 - H. N. McCoy Award for the greatest discovery in chem. Sci., UCLA, United States
2006 - Popular Science magazine’s Brilliant 10 scientists and engineers, United States
2004 - Sacconi Medal, Italian Chemical Society, Division of Inorganic Chemistry, Italy
2002 - Chem Chair’s Excellence in Research Award, University of Michigan, United States
2002 - 3M Faculty Award, United States
1999 - Graduate College Mentor Award, Arizona State University, United States
1998 - Exxon Award, ACS-Solid State Chem. Division, United States
1997 - NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award, United States
1995 - Exxon Education Foundation Award, United States

 

 

Dr. Evelyn Wang

Dr. Wang is the Gail E. Kendall Professor and Associate Department Head for Operations in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also the Associate Director of the Solid State Solar Thermal Energy Conversion (S3TEC) Center.

Education:

• 2006 - Ph.D., Stanford University.
• 2001 - M.Sc., Stanford University.
• 2000 - B.Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Selected Awards:

2016 - ASME Electronics Packaging and Photonics Division Women of the Year Award
2014 - Best Paper Award and Best Poster Award, ITherm
2012 - ASME Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer
2012 - ONR Young Investigator Award
2012 - Best Paper Award (First Prize), ASME Micro and Nano Heat and Mass Transfer International Conference
2011 - AFOSR Young Investigator Award
2010 - Best Paper Award, ITherm
2008 - DARPA Young Faculty Award

Acceptance Speech

unhq300x300Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:

It’s a great pleasure and an honor to be awarded The Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water in the Category of Alternative Water Resources. I want to express my appreciation to the officers, staff and selection committee members for their work on our behalf.

At a time when our planet is crying for help, the visionary principles behind this prize are more important than ever. Although more than 70% of our planet is water, almost 50% of the world population lives in water stressed regions or have no access to clean water. Fortunately, there is a potential solution. It is harvesting water from air. The earth atmosphere holds as much water as we have in lakes and rivers on our planet. This remains an untapped natural resource because of lack of materials capable of plucking water from air in an energy efficient manner.

25 years ago, we embarked on a program to change the way we think about and make new materials. We discovered ways of stitching atoms and molecules with extraordinary precision to make materials in numbers and varieties never experienced before. This chemistry we call reticular chemistry has led to hundreds of thousands of new materials with millions of possibilities being pursued. These new materials are metal-organic frameworks (MOFs): Their structures are beautiful and their interior can be designed to seek water from air, store it in the pores, and concentrate it. By applying only ambient sunlight to such MOFs, water emerges from the pores that can be collected as pure liquid water.

This is a revolution in the making and one we are exploiting to its fullest potential. Considering my childhood experience with lack of water where our home only received running water once a week or sometimes once every two weeks for only 6 hrs, it is especially touching to me to be standing here to receive your recognition. My current and former students deserve much of the credit because of their resilience in chartering the unknown world of materials. I want to acknowledge the support of Prince Dr. Turki Saud Mohammad Al Saud and King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology’s collaboration on this project.

In closing, I wish to express my deep appreciation for your visionary support of an important issue profoundly affecting the lives of people and the health of our planet.

Omar M. Yaghi
October 29, 2018

 

unhq300x300Thank you very much to the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water selection committee for this great honor and recognition: the Alternative Water Resources Prize.

I grew up in southern California, where I was exposed to severe droughts at an early age. This made me appreciate how essential water is in all of our daily lives.

As many of you know, 844 million people lack easy access to safe drinking water.

In our work, we have developed a new way to harvest water from air. We’ve demonstrated a system that would work in the world's driest areas. While this is still a proof-of-concept, this is an important first step towards helping solve water scarcity.

First, I would like to thank my student Hyunho Kim and Postdocs Sameer Rao and Shankar Narayanan, who conceived, designed, and constructed the device. In addition would like to thank Professor Omar Yaghi, who created the metal organic frameworks to make the concept possible. Finally, I would like to thank the awards committee for recognizing the potential of this technology.

We all hope that someday people everywhere will have access to clean drinking water.

Thank you again.

-- Evelyn Wang

Winning Work

[1] H. Furukawa, F. Gándara, Y.-B. Zhang, J. Jiang, W. L. Queen, M. R. Hudson, O. M. Yaghi. Water Adsorption in Porous Metal-Organic Frameworks and Related Materials. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2014, 136, 4369-4381.

[2] H. Kim, S. Yang, S. R. Rao, S. Narayanan, E. A. Kapustin, H. Furukawa, A. S. Umans, O. M. Yaghi, E. N. Wang. Water Harvesting from Air with Metal-Organic Frameworks Powered by Natural Sunlight. Science, 2017, 356, 430-434.

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