Welcoming Three New Faculty
August 26, 2020
AUSTIN, Texas—This Fall, the Department of Geological Sciences (DGS) is pleased to welcome three new faculty members: Dev Niyogi, Geeta Persad, and Daniel Trugman.
Dev Niyogi joins the faculty as a full professor. With a research focus on the impact of land surface processes on a region’s hydroclimatic and environmental extremes, he brings a wealth of expertise to UT Austin and will be part of Planet Texas 2050’s Theme Organizing Committee. Niyogi was most recently a professor in the Department of Agronomy as well as the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University. He was the State Climatologist for Indiana, was appointed chair of the American Meteorological Society Board of Urban Environment, and was elected as an advisory board member of the International Association of Urban Climate.
Another new member of the department’s Water, Climate and Environment Research Group–is Assistant Professor Geeta Persad. After receiving her doctorate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science from Princeton University in 2016, Persad was a Senior Climate Scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a Research Associate at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Her research deploys global climate models to understand the impact of particle aerosol emissions from different regions on the global climate system.
Finally, Daniel Trugman is also joining the faculty as an assistant professor. Trugman was most recently the Richard P. Feynman Distinguished Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and completed his doctorate in the Earth Sciences (Geophysics Program) at the University of California at San Diego in 2017. Trugman harnesses big data and machine learning techniques to study earthquake seismology. His work on earthquake detection drew the notice of Discover Magazine as one of the Top 50 Science Stories of 2019.
“We welcome the addition of these three outstanding researchers and educators to our climate and geophysics areas of expertise. Their arrival further underscores the Department of Geological Sciences leadership across the geosciences,” says Charles Kerans, Professor and Chair of DGS.
Written by Kristin Phillips, Department of Geological Sciences