Rate My Professor Rafael Bras

Rafael L. Bras is the K. Harrison Brown Family Chair and Regents' Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A native of Puerto Rico, he received his BSCE in 1972, MS in Civil Engineering in 1974, and ScD in Water Resources and Hydrology in 1975, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Bras previously served as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Georgia Tech. Before that, he was Distinguished Professor and Dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. For 32 years, he was a professor in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, where he chaired the faculty, headed the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, and directed the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory. He has advised government and private institutions, including the NSF Engineering Directorate Advisory Board, NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, NASA Advisory Committees, and served as a director of AGU and on the UCAR Board of Trustees.

Dr. Bras is a hydrologist, hydrometeorologist, and ecohydrologist whose research interests center on land-atmosphere interactions mediated by soils and vegetation, using satellite observations of soil moisture and rainfall. His contributions encompass uncertainty characterization and stochastic methods for hydro-climatic processes, optimal design of observation networks, real-time data assimilation for hydro-meteorological forecasting, flood and drought management, soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions, landscape evolution modeling, and climate change impacts from deforestation and land use. Key publications include 'Random Functions and Hydrology' (1993, with I. Rodriguez-Iturbe), 'Hydrology: An Introduction to Hydrologic Science' (1990), 'On the Extraction of Channel Networks from Digital Elevation Data' (1991, with D.G. Tarboton and I. Rodriguez-Iturbe), 'Hillslope Processes, Drainage Density, and Landscape Morphology' (1998, with G.E. Tucker), and 'Precipitation Recycling' (1996, with E.A.B. Eltahir). Among his many honors are election to the National Academy of Engineering (2001), Horton Medal (AGU, 2007), James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award (MIT, 2008), Lifetime Achievement Award (ASCE-EWRI, 2017), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023), and Opal Award for Lifetime Achievement in Education (ASCE, 2025).