Beginning Sept. 1, the Texas Water Resources Institute (TWRI) has welcomed two new faculty members to joint appointments between the institute, Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, and Texas A&M University departments.
Hadi Bazrkar, Ph.D., P.E., PMP, joined the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Dallas as an assistant professor of sustainable urban water management in the Texas A&M Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering.
Carlos Vela Garcia, Ph.D., joined the Texas A&M AgriLife High Plains Research and Extension Center in Canyon as an assistant professor of forage systems in the Texas A&M Department of Soil and Crop Sciences.
Bazrkar and Garcia both also have joint appointments with TWRI.
“These two faculty positions represent the initial phase of TWRI’s strategic growth in response to critical and distinct regional water-resource challenges across Texas, including in the High Plains and rapidly growing metropolitan areas such as Dallas-Fort Worth,” said Giovanni Piccinni, Ph.D., TWRI director and professor of soil and crop sciences.
“Addressing Texas’s increasingly complex water challenges while sustaining the economic vitality and quality of life of both urban and rural communities will be essential to supporting the state’s continued population and industrial growth. These faculty appointments will strengthen TWRI’s capacity to address emerging water-resource challenges through interdisciplinary research, innovation, education, and stakeholder engagement.”
Hadi Bazrkar
Bazrkar is a Texas-licensed professional engineer, a TCEQ-licensed landscape irrigator, and a certified Project Management Professional (PMP). As a scientist, his research focuses on water resources engineering and management, with particular emphasis on drought prediction, watershed hydrology, and data-driven environmental modeling. His work integrates hydrologic models, field observations, remote sensing, statistics and machine learning to help communities address challenges related to water supply, quality and infrastructure.
His research program will focus on data-driven, climate-resilient, and sustainable water management by developing decision-support tools to help Texas communities, agricultural producers and water managers prepare for drought, flooding, population growth and increasing water demands. Bazrkar plans to combine physical water-system models with the growing volume of data available from sensors, satellites, weather stations and other sources to better understand and manage water systems across agricultural lands and urban areas.
His research will address practical questions, including future water-need projections for communities, identifying system vulnerabilities and how infrastructure can be managed during drought or extreme rainfall.
He joined Texas A&M as a postdoctoral research associate in 2021 and has gained teaching and research experience across the Texas A&M System, as well as professional experience with municipalities and engineering consulting firms.
Bazrkar’s doctoral research at North Dakota State University focused on drought identification and prediction under changing climate conditions. During that work, he developed the Hydrological and Climatic Aggregate Drought Index, or HADI, to improve drought detection.
Carlos Vela Garcia
Garcia will be building a research and extension program in water-limited forage systems for the Texas High Plains.
His research will focus on developing integrated water-efficient forage systems that sustain forage and livestock production under water-limited conditions. His program will include annual and perennial forage evaluation, forage mixtures, irrigation and nutrient management, grazing systems, soil health, and precision technologies to improve forage productivity, water-use efficiency, and sustainability.
Through interdisciplinary collaborations, his program will bring together expertise in plant, soil, water, and livestock systems.
Garcia’s extension work will provide the latest science-based water-efficient forage and livestock production information through field demonstrations, on-farm trials, field days, producer workshops, extension publications, and stakeholder outreach.
He recently completed a postdoctoral research associate position at Clemson University, and prior to that, studied in the Peruvian Amazon and the semiarid region of Brazil.
