As communities across Texas face the threat of flash flooding, Rice University experts are available to discuss the factors that make these events so dangerous, including intense rainfall, rapidly rising waterways, urban development and changing weather patterns.
Philip Bedient, the Herman and George R. Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center
Bedient specializes in flood prediction, warning systems and storm surge modeling. He is working with researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington to develop a real-time flood warning system for the Texas Hill Country designed to provide residents and emergency managers with earlier, more precise alerts during rapidly evolving flood events. He can discuss flash-flood risks in Texas, warning systems and preparedness measures that can help reduce loss of life during extreme weather events.
James Doss-Gollin, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering
Doss-Gollin is an expert on extreme rainfall, urban flooding, infrastructure resilience and flood-risk management. His research explores probabilistic hazard modeling and its applications, including rainfall frequency estimation, physics-informed machine learning for flood simulation and power grid resilience to climate extremes. He combines physical modeling with statistical and machine learning methods to better characterize risk under changing environmental conditions. He is a member of Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center and leads the Advancing AI for Climate Risk and Resilience cluster at the university.
To schedule an interview with one of these experts, contact media relations specialist Alex Becker at alex.becker@rice.edu.