Instructor Profile: Saman Razavi
Saman Razavi
Ph.D., P. Eng
National Hydrology Research Centre
Dr. Saman Razavi is an Associate Professor of hydrology and water resources engineering at the School of Environment and Sustainability, Department of Civil, Geological and Environmental Engineering, and Global Institute for Water Security, University of Saskatchewan. He received a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2013.
Dr. Razavi’s research is at the science-policy interface, bridging hydrological modelling and predicting flood and drought events to integrated management of water and environmental systems and decision and policy making. He develops methods based on systems and data sciences, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, and machine learning. He is the lead developer of VARS-Tool, which is a toolbox for sensitivity and uncertainty analysis (https://vars-tool.com/), and the Principal Investigator of the Integrated Modelling Program for Canada (https://gwf.usask.ca/impc/).
Dr. Razavi has taught courses in engineering hydrology at the undergraduate level, where he modernized the existing curriculum. At the graduate level, he has offered advanced watershed modelling, optimization, and sensitivity and uncertainty analysis courses. Dr. Razavi has advised governments on important water-related issues, including drainage impacts in the prairies, water licensing and allocation, and tradeoffs between irrigation expansion, hydropower and environmental or cultural flows. He contributes to the engineering and scientific community through his role on the editorial boards of the Journal of Hydrology, Environmental Modelling & Software, and Frontiers in Water. He is also the past chair of the American Geophysical Union (AGU)’s Technical Committee on Hydrologic Uncertainty and has run many sessions at multiple national and international conferences.
Dr. Razavi is the recipient of several awards, including the 2020 Early Career Research Excellence Award from the International Environmental Modeling and Software Society and the 2019 Young Scientist Award from the Canadian Geophysical Union. His research has been featured in media, such as CBC, CTV, and Radio Canada.
