I am Yadu Pokhrel, an Associate Professor at Michigan State University (MSU). As one of the faculty members working in very broad areas of Hydrology and Water Resources in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, I lead the research group that particularly focuses on i) large-scale hydrological/Earth system modeling considering human impacts on water resources and climate, ii) climate change impacts, iii) sustainable food-energy-water systems, and v) infrastructural and societal resilience under climate extremes.

Fundamentally, my research seeks to improve the understanding of the changes in the terrestrial water cycle in response to the combined effects of human activities and climate change. I take an interdisciplinary approach to studying the complex interconnectedness between changing freshwater resources and the resilience of social, environmental, and agricultural systems—from local to global scales. Central to my research is water and climate change; however, the problems I study, and address, are inherently linked to environmental sustainability and societal resilience. I focus on worsening supply-demand imbalance of water due to climate change, intensified extremes, and human stressors, and the associated challenges in securing future FEW supplies and maintaining environmental sustainability. This focus also relates to better understanding the integrity of water, energy, and transportation infrastructures under future extremes (e.g., transportation under growing urban flooding and energy generation under frequent droughts). The overarching goal is to address accelerating societal and environmental problems related to climate change and water toward developing adaptation strategies for resilient transportation-food-energy-water (TFEW) systems.

Our current research projects are on the following (including but not limited to) broad areas:

• Advancing hydrological and Earth system modeling by accounting for water management (e.g., irrigation, reservoir operation, groundwater pumping, environmental flows, and nutrient flows)
• Sustainable Water and Nutrient Management in Stressed Agro-Ecosystems
• Climate Change, Droughts, and Environmental Sustainability
• Climate Change, Water, Energy, and Transportation System Interdependencies for Resilient Urban Futures
• Sustainable Hydropower Development (Amazon and Mekong basins) and Dam Safety under Future Extremes
• Large-Scale Climate-Irrigation-Groundwater Interactions within the Earth system