M Sivapalan

Early life and family

Sivapalan was born on 19 April 1953. He was the son of Sangarapillai Murugesu and Umadevy from Karaveddy in northern Ceylon. He was educated at Hartley College. After school he joined the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, graduating from its successor, the University of Sri Lanka Peradeniya campus in 1975 with a B.Sc degree in civil engineering. He later received a M.Eng. in water resources engineering from the Asian Institute of Technology in 1977, and a M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1986) in civil engineering, with a major in hydrology from Princeton University.

Sivapalan is married to Banumathy. They have two sons (Mayuran and Kavin).

Career

Sivapalan worked briefly at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Sri Lanka Peradeniya campus as an instructor in civil engineering in 1975. He was graduate student/research associate at the Division of Water Resources Engineering, Asian Institute of Technology between 1975 and 1977. He then worked as a consulting civil engineer for Rocks & Stones in Ibadan, Nigeria between 1978 and 1981. He was a research associate at Princeton University's Department of Civil Engineering and Operations Research between 1986 and 1988. He then worked at the University of Western Australia's Centre for Water Research for 17 years, initially as a lecturer (1988) before being promoted to senior lecturer (1992), associate professor (1995) and professor (1999). He was visiting professor at Vienna Technical University, Delft Technical University, University of Technology, Sydney and Tsinghua University. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2005, teaching undergraduate and post-graduate courses in watershed hydrology, engineering hydrology, stochastic hydrology and water resources engineering. In 2007 Sivapalan was the Borland Lecturer at the AGU Hydrology Days at Colorado State University. He became Chester and Helen Siess Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois in April 2015.

Sivapalan was founding chair of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences' Decade on Predictions in Ungauged Basins initiative. He has served on the editorial boards of several international journals and was executive editor of the European Geophysical Union’s Hydrology and Earth System Sciences journal. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2003), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (2001) and International Water Academy. He has won the International Hydrology Prize from the International Associate of Hydrological Sciences, the Hydrological Sciences Award (2010), the Robert E. Horton Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2011) and the John Dalton Medal from the European Geosciences Union (2003). He received the Centenary Medal from Australia in 2003 "for service to Australian Society in Hydrology and Environmental Engineering". He has an honorary doctorate from Delft Technical University.