Venkataraman Lakshmi is a Professor of Engineering Systems and the Environment at the University of Virginia. He has worked on water resources problems combining hydrological modeling and satellite remote sensing for over 30 years. He recently completed a Group of Earth Observations (GEO) project supported by NASA Applied Sciences (Water Resources) on use of modeling and remote sensing (Ganga River Basin) and capacity building (Cauvery River Basin) working with the Ministry of Water, Government of Karnataka (2017-2020). His areas of expertise range from retrieval of hydrological variables from satellite and aircraft sensors, downscaling of soil moisture, hydrological modeling of large river basins using in-situ and satellite data sets for modeling soil moisture, evapotranspiration and streamflow and use of artificial intelligence/machine learning for determining connections between terrestrial and atmospheric variables to characterize continental hydrology. He has investigated the phenomena of droughts, floods, landslides, and permafrost occurrence using models and satellite observations.