PIRE graduates recruitment in full swing
Active recruitment of graduate students this fall is in full swing in all PIRE Project participating institutions. Berihun and Meijian joined University of Connecticut (UConn), Sarah, University of Wisconsin (UW) and Dejene Ethiopian Institute of Water Resources (EIWR-AAU).
Mr Berihun Tefera is a PhD candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics in the University of Connecticut. He has a MA degree in Regional and Local Development Studies from Addis Ababa University and BSc degree in Agricultural economics from Haromaya (the former Alemaya) University. He has a very good experience in Agricultural and Socioeconomic research while he has been working in different agricultural research centers and Bahir Dar University. He has a number of published journals and other articles related to agricultural marketing and value chain, water and forest resource management and adoption of technologies. Mr Berihun Tefera has been working as head of Environmental Research Directorate of Blue Nile Water Institute since 2014. His current research focus is on decision analysis of households and institutions based on hydro climatic forecast in the farming system with special emphasis to irrigation.
Meijian Yang holds a BS in Hydroelectricity Engineering from North China Electric Power University and a MS in Hydrology and Water Resources from China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research. His MS research includes two main parts: 1. climate change and extreme weather in China, 2. filed experiment of maize growth and crop-groundwater coupling model development. His current research interests include crop modeling, irrigation management, climate change, and groundwater.
Sarah Alexander holds a B.A. in Geology from Carleton College (Northfield, MN) and is a M.S. Candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. At Carleton, she was a co-founder, coordinator, and teacher for a summer geoscience camp that aimed to spark girls’ interest in STEM, and had the opportunity to present her senior thesis research at the Geological Society of America conference in 2014. Most recently, she served as Project Coordinator for an educational non-profit in Minnesota, directing the development of K-12 curriculum on water resources that became recognized statewide. Sarah is passionate about helping address critical environmental issues in communities through research, education, communication, and outreach. Her current research interests center around sustainable water resource management at the local and regional level.
Dejene Sahlu Mekuria works in the Abbay Basin (Blue Nile) Authority as the department of head of Basin Information Management since 2011. Currently he is a PhD candidate in Addis Ababa University Ethiopian Institute of Water Resources (AAU-EiWR). He holds a BSc in Physics from Addis Ababa University, Postgraduate Diploma in Meteorology from University of Nairobi (Kenya) and MSc in Physics specialized in Radar Science from Bahir Dar University. His MSc. thesis was in titled on “Simulation on a weather radar measurement”. In addition to this, he has been taking online MSc courses in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) from Lund University. He has engaged in various research activities on water availability and contributing journal articles. His current research interests and activities are on water resource availability and modeling.
PIRE Management welcomes these young researchers and congratulate them for joining the project team– a golden opportunity to realize their obvious research potential.