Casey Brown Appointed as Provost Professor
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Professor Casey Brown of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department is one of six UMass Amherst faculty members selected by Provost John McCarthy as Provost Professors. This new, campus-level, faculty honorific recognizes exceptional achievement in research or creative activity and in teaching. See UMass News Article
“It is important that we show our most outstanding faculty how much we value them and honor the work that they do,” said McCarthy. “This new title provides another way of doing that.”
The Provost Professor title is designated for tenure-system faculty who hold the rank of professor and do not hold a named or distinguished professorship. Recipients also receive an awards package of $12,500 each.
Brown heads the Hydrosystems Research Group in the CEE department. As he said, “This research group pursues the broad concept of water sustainability through water resources systems analysis, decision theory, and the study of hydro-climatology. Water sustainability will be achieved decision by decision, and our goal is to make each decision better informed.”
Brown added that “A current focus is the use of artificial intelligence to accelerate adaptation to climate change in the water sector. The work is inherently interdisciplinary, and we seek meaningful collaboration with social scientists, earth scientists, ecologists, and data scientists.”
Among many other honors, Brown has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) Huber Research Prize.
Brown’s work is funded by the National Science Foundation, NOAA, the Department of Defense, the World Bank, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Brown is an associate editor of Water Resources Research and the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management. In addition, he chairs the Water and Society Technical Committee of the American Geophysical Union Hydrology Section and the Water Resources Planning Under Climate Change Technical Committee of the ASCE Environmental and Water Resources Institute Systems Committee.
Brown is also an adjunct associate research scientist at Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering Science from Harvard University and led the water team at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. (June 2022)