Welcome to the new HEPEX Regional Chair for South America

HEPEX has a new regional chair, Professor Walter Collishonn, who kindly accepted to be regional chair for South America.

Walter is a professor at the IPH Institute of Hydraulic Research since 2005. IPH is a research institute connected to the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He has a BSc degree in Mechanical Engineering (1994), an MSc degree (1997) and a PhD (2001) in Water Resources and Sanitation from UFRGS.

UFRGS was founded in 1934 and has about 2,500 lecturers and professors. It offers 75 graduation courses for approximately 36,000 students (undergraduate and graduate).

IPH receives students from all over Brazil as well as from other countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Colombia and Mozambique.

They are offered both Master’s and Ph.D. programs in Water Resources. Research areas include Sanitation, Hydraulics, Water resources management, Fluid mechanics and Hydrology.

At IPH, Walter Collischonn leads the Large scale hydrology group.

Their research interests include: streamflow forecasting, large scale hydrology, climate impacts and water resources management. General research aims are:

• to improve modelling capacity of large scale hydrological systems considering typical South-American availability of data and resources,
• to improve understanding of those systems and the quality of the predictions of what may happen to them subject to weather, climate and human impacts.

HEPEX welcomes its new regional chair and wishes that the community will see an increasing participation from researchers, operational forecasting centres and users from South American countries.

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HEPEX governance strategy, based on three co-leaders and regional chairs, was discussed during the Beijing workshop in October 2012. The role of the regional chairs is to act as focal points and to liaison with and grow HEPEX-related activities within the region.