Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist and Global Futures Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, where he is Chief Scientist of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. His research uses satellites to track how freshwater availability is changing around the world. He pioneered the use of NASA’s GRACE mission to detect groundwater depletion from space, work that revealed how quickly many of the world’s major aquifers are being drawn down.
Before ASU, Jay was Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he is now Professor Emeritus, Senior Water Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a professor at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Texas at Austin. He was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to California’s Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board in 2014, was the founding Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley water startup Waterplan, is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America, and hosts the podcast What About Water? He holds a PhD in civil engineering from Princeton, an MS in hydrology from the University of Arizona and a BS in geology from Tufts.
On OceanWell’s Advisory Board, Jay brings the science of global water scarcity: where supplies are failing, how fast, and what new sources will be needed. OceanWell’s mission is to add 1 million acre-feet (1.2 billion m³) of affordable, environmentally sustainable fresh water to the global supply within a decade.
