CEE’s Colin Gleason Generates Pioneering Research in Hydrology as the Armstrong Professional Development Professor

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Colin Gleason

In the three momentous years that Professor Colin Gleason of the UMass Amherst Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department served as the Armstrong Professional Development Professor, from July of 2023 to July of 2026, the professorship supported him while carrying out an amazing array of achievements. During his professorship, the renowned hydrologist served in key roles for NASA, attracted over $10 million in funded research, published cutting-edge discoveries in influential scientific journals, and further established himself as one of the world’s leading experts on rivers.

The Armstrong endowed professorship was established in 2001 with a gift from John and Elizabeth Armstrong of Amherst, Massachusetts, and a matching grant from the University of Massachusetts President’s Distinguished Professorship Initiative. The professorship is awarded for a three-year period to a faculty member who is at the beginning of his or her career and has demonstrated substantial achievement and great promise in the areas of teaching and research. 

Gleason’s stint as Armstrong Professor highlighted the position’s impact by demonstrating the kind of remarkable accomplishments that the position was created to enable.

Gleason is an internationally known hydrologist who studies critical water-resource challenges on a global scale in his Fluvial@UMass lab. As he says, “We care about rivers. We do field work, satellite remote sensing, machine learning, and modelling in order to improve our basic understanding of these most important water features. Our long-term goal is complete simultaneous knowledge of all rivers on Earth.” 

Since arriving at UMass Amherst in 2016, Gleason has received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the NASA New Investigator Award, and other coveted honors. During his time as Armstrong Professor, Gleason has been the lead academic scientist for calibration/validation of U.S. inland hydrology for NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, the co-lead of the SWOT Discharge Algorithm Working Group, a member of NASA’s SWOT and High Mountain Asia science teams, and the lead developer of a revolutionary open-source software known as Confluence, which NASA uses to produce unprecedented global river findings from SWOT data. 

As Armstrong Professor, Gleason also won the esteemed American Geophysical Union 2023 Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award, given by the world’s largest professional association for Earth scientists “for meritorious work or service toward advancing discovery and solution science in hydrology.” 

During his term as Armstrong Professor, Gleason has attracted well over $10 million in research funding as a principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on 11 research grants from NASA, NSF, and other sources such as the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center.

The most recent of these NASA awards emphasizes the far-reaching impact of Gleason’s research. In the spring of 2026, Gleason was the PI on a major $5.89-million NASA grant leading a multi-institutional team to study the interaction between the frigid saltwater in the Arctic and the freshwater rivers that empty into it. This project is a monumental effort combining field work in Alaska, icebreaking ships in the Arctic Ocean, and NASA’s satellite data. The multi-institutional collaboration involves hydrologists, oceanographers, and delta specialists from UMass Amherst, the University of Washington, Williams College, the University of Cincinnati, Pennsylvania State University, and the United States Geological Survey. See UMass Amherst Receives nearly $6 Million NASA Grant to Understand the Fate of River Water in the Arctic Ocean : Riccio College of Engineering : UMass Amherst.

Another sign of Gleason’s widespread influence as the Armstrong Professor was the development of groundbreaking software called Confluence that his research team created for NASA under his leadership as the PI. Confluence turns data from international satellite missions into usable information on both the volume and quality of water flowing through all of Earth’s rivers wider than 50 meters. Confluence is the first platform to estimate flow volume combined with river sediment on one platform that is freely available to a global community of water-resource managers, planners, policy makers, climate scientists, and hydrologists. It also marks the first time that scientists can create timely models of river flow and water quality on a global scale and has been adopted by a user community of more than 50 global scientists contributing code and ideas. This open-source technology has been fully transferred to NASA to serve the public, as befits its origins at a public university.

Yet another measure of Gleason’s success is the impact of trailblazing papers he has published in leading scientific journals during his time as Armstrong Professor. For example, Gleason led an international team of researchers who tracked changes in more than 114,000 rivers in high-mountain Asia over a 15-year period, and his graduate student Jonathan Flores reported their findings in AGU Advances. Gleason‘s postdoctoral scholar Dongmei Feng led a study in Science that mapped 35 years of river changes on a global scale for the first time. In another Science paper led by Ph.D. student Craig Brinkerhoff, Gleason and colleagues from Yale suggested that a new Supreme Court ruling left many U.S. waterways vulnerable to pollution. 

Beyond those papers and others published by Gleason in prominent journals, an article in Water Resources Research, which presented a framework for estimating global river discharge via NASA’s SWOT Mission, was named as one of the journal’s five most-read papers in 2023. 

This brief article represents only the tip of the iceberg of those extensive and impactful attainments by Gleason and the talented researchers he has been mentoring in his lab. His considerable accomplishments while carrying the banner of the Armstrong Professorship, and his recent promotion to the rank of professor, are proof positive of the power of named professorships. They are among the most potent ways that donors can shape the future of engineering education and research at UMass Amherst. These gifts help attract and retain exceptional faculty members whose work drives discovery, sparks innovation, and addresses the world’s most pressing challenges. 

By providing resources for academic-year compensation, start-up funding, and research initiatives, professorships enable faculty to pursue bold ideas that serve the common good. Creating a named professorship requires establishing an endowment with a minimum of $1.5 million or a current-use commitment of $300,000. (August 2026)