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Charuleka Varadharajan Receives DOE Early Career Research Award
August 6, 2019 | Christina Procopiou | LBL EESA News
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EESA research scientist Charuleka Varadharajan has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science to receive significant funding for research through its Early Career Research Program.
The program, now in its tenth year, is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work. Varadharajan and Peter Sorenson of the Berkeley Lab Physics Division are among 73 recipients selected this year, including 27 from DOE’s national laboratories.
Varadharajan, who has interdisciplinary expertise in biogeochemistry and data sciences, is expected to receive a grant of up to $2.5 million over five years to cover year-round salary plus research expenses. She is the deputy lead of the ESS-DIVE data repository, a co-lead of the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area and Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments-Tropics data management teams, and a senior fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. Her award is for her work in “investigating the impacts of streamflow disturbances on water quality using a data-driven framework.”
The project will determine how the intensity, duration, and frequency of streamflow disturbances will change water quality at the impacted locations and downstream. It will employ a novel data-driven framework to integrate extensive data from across the continental U.S. and use advanced analytical and machine-learning techniques to predict the resistance and resilience of water quality to different types of disturbance events.
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