Professor of Environmental and Water Resource Systems Engineering
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Cornell University, United States of America

Prof. Jery Stedinger acceptance speach

Dr. Stedinger received a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Systems Engineering from Harvard University in 1977. Since that time he has been a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University.

This award recognizes the valuable contributions that Dr. Stedinger and his collaborators have made to improve the statistical framework for understanding and interpreting hydrologic and flood data, including historical and regional information, so that flood risk management and flood control projects an effectively address the real risk of floods to lives, property, economic activities, and society generally.

In particular, the framework he put pioneered in the 1980s for use of historical and paleoflood data has endured as the appropriate conceptual paradigm for understanding and interpreting historical records and physical evidence documenting the occurrence of floods that date from before the beginning of regular measurements. He has also pioneered a sound statistical framework for the regional regression as a tool for the regional analysis of hydrologic data and for network design. His methods are now the standard for such flood frequency estimation procedures for ungauged sites around the world. He has also pursued regional index flood and other flood quantile estimators that efficiently employ regional and at-site information, as well as historical and physiographic data. Such methods are particularly valuable in flood-prone arid areas, as well as other data-poor regions of the world. Other research has addressed the integration of risk and uncertainty into evaluation of flood protection projects, dam safety concerns, and water resource system operation and system design.

Jery was a 1984-89 NSF Presidential Young Investigator, a 1989 ASCE Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize winner, and the 1997 winner of the Julian Hinds Award of the Water Resources Planning and Management Division of ASCE. In May 2000 he was elected a fellow of the Amer. Geophysical Union, and in 2001 was elected a member of the International Water Academy, Oslo, Norway. Jery was lead author of the frequency analysis chapter in the 1993 McGraw-Hill Handbook of Hydrology and an author of the 1981 textbook Water Resource Systems Planning and Analysis. He is an author of over one hundred professional referred papers. Jery has served on National Research Council Committees on Dam Safety, Water Resources Research, and Flood Risk Management and the American River, and USACE Risk-Based Analyses; and advisory committees on flood frequency analysis for the World Meteorological Organization and all US Federal agencies, and specific flood risk issues for the US Bureau of Reclamation and the US Army Corp of Engineers (USACE).