David R. Maidment

Hussein M. Alharthy Centennial Chair in Civil Engineering
Director, Center for Research in Water Resources
University of Texas at Austin

Full Resume

One Page Summary Resume

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David R. Maidment is the Hussein M. Alharthy Centennial Chair in Civil Engineering and Director of the Center for Research in Water Resources at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has been on the faculty since 1981.  He received his Bachelor's degree in Agricultural Engineering with First Class Honors from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and his MS and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Texas, he was a research scientist at the Ministry of Works and Development in New Zealand, and at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, Austria, and he was also a Visiting Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University.

Dr Maidment is a specialist in surface water hydrology, and in particular in the application of geographic information systems to hydrology.   In 2010 he received the AWRA Award for Water Resources Data and Information Systems, which was also permanently renamed the David R. Maidment Award for Water Resources Data and Information Systems, in recognition of his contributions to the American Water Resources Association.

Since 1989, he has been cooperating in this field with ESRI, manufacturers of Arc/Info and ArcView, the leading GIS programs world-wide.  Each year, Dr Maidment presents a survey of the state of the art in GIS and hydrology at the ESRI User Conference http://www.crwr.utexas.edu/archive.shtml  He is the principal designer of the Arc Hydro data model, which is a customization of the ArcGIS geographic information system for  surface water resources, published in the book Arc Hydro: GIS for Water Resources in 2002, and more recently also for groundwater resources published in the book Arc Hydro Groundwater: GIS for Hydrogeology in 2010. 

Dr Maidment is the leader of the CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc) project on Hydrologic Information Systems, which is designed to provide improved access to hydrologic data, and synthesis into a digital watershed for application at the nation’s universities.  In 2010 he received CUAHSI’s Community Service Award for his contributions to hydrologic information systems.

More information about his research can be found on Dr Maidment's home page: http://www.caee.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/ .

Dr Maidment teaches classes in hydrology, hydraulics, computer programming and GIS in Water Resources.   Dr Maidment is also co-author of the text Applied Hydrology (McGraw-Hill, 1988), Editor in Chief of the Handbook of Hydrology (McGraw-Hill, 1993), and co-editor of the monograph Hydrologic and Hydraulic Modeling Support with GIS (ESRI Press, 2000).  From 1992 to 1995 he was Editor of the Journal of Hydrology. 

In 2003, Dr Maidment received ESRI’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the application of GIS in Water Resources, and was made a National Associate of the National Academies of Science and Engineering.  In 2002, he received a Hydrologic Benchmark Award from the US Geological Survey for contributions to the USGS National Water-Use Information Program, and he was elected a Fellow of the International Water Resources Association.   He is also a member of the American Geophysical Union, American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Water Resources Association, the American Institute of Hydrology, and the New Zealand Hydrological Society.

Dr Maidment lives with his wife, Dr Helen J. Maidment, in Austin, Texas.   They have two daughters, Amy and Linda, who also live in central Texas.   All members of the Maidment family were born in New Zealand, and they became American citizens in November 1996.

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