The IAH Distinguished Lecturer series aims to enhance the visibility of IAH at the international level, and extend the relevance of groundwater beyond the hydrogeology community.
We are pleased to announce that the inaugural Distinguished Lecturer will be Professor Jay Famiglietti. The first lecture in this new series will be delivered at the IAH 2026 World Groundwater Congress in Budapest.
Jay Famiglietti
Jay Famiglietti is a hydrogeologist and Global Futures Professor at Arizona State University where he is Director of Science for the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. He is President-Elect of the AGU Hydrology Section. Before moving to ASU, Famiglietti was founding Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan; he was Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan; he was Senior Water Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech; he was appointed to the California State Water Boards; and he held faculty positions at UC Irvine and UT Austin. His research group uses satellites to track how freshwater availability is changing around the globe. They pioneered the methods to detect groundwater depletion from space. Famiglietti is a fellow of the AGU and the GSA, he is a recipient of AGU’s Peter S. Eagleson Hydrological Sciences Award, and the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water. He is committed to science communication, and to elevating the representation of water in the UN frameworks for climate change, desertification, and biodiversity.
