Dr. Yadu Pokhrel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He received his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Tokyo in Japan in 2011. He conducted postdoctoral research first at Hokkaido University, Japan and then at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he next served as a research assistant professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences before joining Michigan State University as an assistant professor in 2014.

Dr. Pokhrel’s research interests are in the following broad areas: sustainable  Food-Energy-Water (FEW) systems; interactions between human water management practices (e.g., irrigation, dam operation, and groundwater pumping) and the water cycle; modeling water resource availability and use; impact of climate change on water availability; and competing use of water for different societal sectors (e.g., domestic, industrial, agricultural). A hydrological-agricultural-ecological modeling framework that simulates the integrated effects of human water management and climate change on water resources and the interactions among these natural-human systems constitutes the foundation of Dr. Pokhrel’s research. He uses this novel framework to address pressing science and societal issues related to FEW systems at the global to local scales. He has studied depleting groundwater systems in the High Plains in the Central US and Central Valley Aquifer in California. He currently has a number of active international projects including those in the Mekong River basin in Southeast Asia, Amazon River basin in South America, and Karnali River basin in Nepal. His research is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).