Abstract:

Dr. Elfatih Eltahir is the Breene M. Kerr Professor of Hydrology and Climate, and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Eltahir earned a B.Sc. in civil engineering from the University of Khartoum in 1985 (First Class Honors); an M.Sc. in hydrology from the National University of Ireland in 1988 (First Class Honors); and the S.M. in meteorology and Sc.D. in Hydro-climatology, both from MIT in 1993.

Dr. Eltahir is a recipient of the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1997; and the Kuwait Prize in Applied Science in 2000 for his work on climate change. He has been elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2008. He received the Hydrologic Sciences Award of the American Geophysical Union in 2017.

Abstract:

Climate change is the most urgent global environmental problem facing all of us. However, society is not taking enough action to address climate change, in large part, because people seem to think that climate change though real will not impact them directly. The research in my group is designed to create new knowledge that defines how climate change impacts society locally through processes that people care about (water, disease, weather, agriculture etc). I will present examples sampled from a series of studies on: heatwaves in Asia, floods in the Nile basin, malaria in Africa, agriculture in the American Midwest, and droughts over the Mediterranean and Europe.