Bio
Dr. Shih-Chieh Kao is a Distinguished R&D Staff and Group Leader of the Water Resource Science and Engineering Group within the Environmental Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He also serves as Program Manager for the ORNL Water Power Program, overseeing various research projects supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO). His research areas include high-performance computing, hydrologic modeling, flood simulation, hydro-climate impact assessment, and hydropower resource evaluation. Since 2011, he has been leading the SECURE Water Act Section 9505 Assessment, which examines the effects of climate change on national hydropower production.
Dr. Kao is a co-creator of the TRITON inundation model and the Dayflow dataset. He has served as a frequent reviewer for over 20 scientific and engineering journals and has received several distinguished awards, including the 2008 Purdue Civil Engineering Best Dissertation Award, the 2009 Journal of Hydrologic Engineering Outstanding Reviewer Award, the 2013 ICSH Statistical Hydrology Best Paper Award, and the 2020 Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Best Paper Award. In 2023, he was named a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers-Environmental & Water Resources Institute. Dr. Kao also contributed to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) study on modernizing probable maximum precipitation estimates in a changing climate.
Education
Ph.D., Civil Engineering, Purdue University, May 2008
M.S., Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, June 2001
B.S., Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, June 1999