Reza Najafi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Western University. Prior to joining Western, he was a research scientist and a postdoctoral researcher at the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (University of Victoria), and the Byrd Polar Research Centre (Ohio State University). Najafi’s research team develops and integrates state-of-the-art statistical and process-based approaches to understand and predict the spatial and temporal variability of natural hazard risks under climate change. We quantify the contribution of anthropogenic factors and internal climate variability to changes in the historical and projected hydroclimatic extremes. Our group characterizes the interactions between hazards and infrastructure systems in space and time to assess the corresponding compounding and cascading risks. This will lead to the development of effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. Our interdisciplinary research contributes to the assessment of climate change impacts on extreme events, floods and droughts, climate model downscaling, multi-modelling, uncertainty quantification and communication, Bayesian inference, remote sensing, distributed hydrologic modelling and multivariate extremes.
