Naresh Devineni, civil engineer at The City College of New York, plans to use his recently-awarded 2017 Early Career Research Program award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to study extreme events across the United States. The DOE Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research will support Devineni’s work as part of the Regional and Global Climate Modeling (RGCM) program.

Devineni is one of 59 awardees from various fields nationwide to receive the award this year. The award will fund his research to apply causality models to analyze the earth system dynamics that lead to extreme events from a statistics and physics perspective. The first phase of the project will focus on data compilation and analysis to understand better, the variability in extreme events along with their causes. The second phase involves developing an extremes prediction model that is based on Bayesian learning.

The Early Career Research Program, now in its eighth year, is managed by the DOE Office of Science and awards research grants to young scientists and engineers at U.S. universities and national laboratories. The grants are designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early years of their careers.

Devineni, the first City University of New York faculty member to receive an Early Career Award from DOE, will receive $750,000 over the next five years to further his research.