California Governor Edmund G. Brown has appointed James Famiglietti to the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board. The Board seeks to protect the quality of the water in the region by “formulating and adopting water quality plans for specific ground or surface water bodies, and by prescribing and enforcing requirements on domestic and industrial water discharges.”
A faculty member at the University of California-Irvine, Famiglietti is a professor of earth system science in the School of Physical Sciences and of civil engineering in The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, and is the director of the U.C. Center for Hydrologic Modeling. His research interests include hydrology and climate, remote sensing of the terrestrial and global water cycles, hydrological and Earth system modeling, freshwater availability, and climate change. Before arriving at U.C. in 2001, Famiglietti was an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin and a postdoctoral research fellow in the Climate System Modeling Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Famiglietti received a B.S. in geology from Tufts University in 1982. This was followed by an M.S. in hydrology from the University of Arizona in 1986 and a Ph.D. in civil engineering and operations research from Princeton in 1992. For the next two years, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the department.
