University of Colorado Boulder Archives

Rajagopalan Balaji

Prof. Rajagopalan Balaji is a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute of Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder. He was the former chair (2014–2022) of the department. He received his BTech in civil engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, India, in 1989, MTech in optimization and reliability engineering from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, in 1991, and a PhD in stochastic hydrology and hydroclimatology from Utah State University, Logan, in 1995. Following this, he worked as a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, NY, before joining the faculty of CEAE at CU, Boulder, where he was promoted to full professorship in 2010.

Prof. Balaji pursues research in diverse interdisciplinary areas spanning hydroclimatology, water resources management, Indian summer monsoon, paleoclimate, and stochastic hydrology. For his research contributing to the improved operations, management, and planning of water resources in the semiarid river basins of western USA, especially the Colorado River System, Prof. Balaji was a co-recipient of the Partners in Conservation Award from the Department of Interior in 2009. Besides, his joint work on unraveling the mystery of the Indian summer monsoon droughts which appeared in Science in 2006 was awarded the prestigious Norbert Gerbier Mumm Award from the World Meteorological Organization in 2009. In 2019, he was elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union..

Prof. Balaji has a strong publication record in peer-reviewed journals like Science, Nature Geoscience, and Geophysical Research Letters. He has also served as an associated editor of ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management and Geophysical Research Letters, and currently serves as an associate editor of Water Resources Research and Climate Research.

The socioeconomic health of India’s people and ecosystems is intricately tied to the pulse of its monsoonal climate and variability, but this is now under existential threat from climate change. The pressing need to understand the fingerprints of climate in natural and human systems to enable sustainable policies is motivating Prof. Balaji’s Fulbright-Kalam project. In this context, he is pursuing three research threads to understand and model the signatures of climate change and variability related to: hydroclimate extremes; water quality and public health; and the rise and fall of past societies in India and implications for future human migration.

Tsering Lhamo

Tsering Lhamo is a first-generation Tibetan-American PhD student. Her research is taking place under the guidance of Dr. Emily Yeh at the Geography Department of the University of Colorado Boulder. Coming from an interdisciplinary background in international development and global health, Tsering’s research interests center on the intersections of sustainable development, political ecology, traditional medicines, and cross-border trade within the Himalayan region. As an American India Foundation (AIF) William J. Clinton Fellow from 2017–2018, Tsering worked with the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI) to conduct baseline research and interventions on reproductive health among adolescents in underserved female populations in rural mountain communities in Uttarakhand, India. Trained in biomedical sciences, Tsering has worked as a laboratory associate at the Yale New Haven Hospital. She has also served as an AmeriCorps volunteer where she tutored young students from underprivileged communities in Washington, D.C. Tsering holds a master’s degree in international development from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, where she specialized in environmental sustainability and global health. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international studies with a minor in biology from the American University in Washington, D.C. Tsering is also a recipient of the U.S. Department of Education’s 2023 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for studying Nepali language.

Found in the Himalayas, the caterpillar fungus is an assemblage of organisms composed of a fungal body protruding from the head of its moth larva host. Valued within Chinese medicine and in biopharmaceuticals for its therapeutic functions, the fungus has been worth more than its weight in gold on the market. As a result, the fungus collection and trade are a source of as much as 50-90% of cash income for the Bhutia, Lepcha, Nepalese, and Tibetan people who participate in the fungus harvest and trade in the Indian Himalayas. However, not much is known about the caterpillar fungus trade in the Eastern Indian Himalayas. Tsering’s research seeks to understand the lived experiences of Himalayan communities in Siliguri region of North Bengal in the larger West Bengal state, using the caterpillar fungus trade as an analytical tool. Tsering will be working under the guidance of Dr. Swatasiddha Sarkar from the Centre for Himalayan Studies at North Bengal University in Siliguri, West Bengal. Dr. Sarkar’s expertise in the regional geography combined with his scholarship on labor and ethnicity will be paramount to my research on the caterpillar fungus trade in the region.