CUAHSI's 25th Anniversary Reflections: Convening the Community in the New Era of Water Science, by Hoori Ajami
Posted Aug 11, 2026
Convening the Community in the New Era of Water Science
By Hoori Ajami, CUAHSI Board of Directors, Chair-Elect 2027
I first heard about CUAHSI as a graduate student at the University of Arizona, during my first AGU Fall meeting in 2007. My co-mentor, the late Professor Thomas Meixner, always reminded us that Tuesday evening was reserved for the Hydrology Section and CUAHSI reception, and he strongly encouraged us to attend. I remember going to that first reception and feeling inspired hearing about the latest developments and opportunities within the hydrologic science community, and what opportunities CUAHSI offered. AGU meetings are huge, so having a more focused networking event, one that put real emphasis on graduate student engagement, meant a great deal to me. This event quickly became a tradition, and I made sure to attend every year after that.
I became formally involved with CUAHSI in 2021, when I was a faculty member at the University of California, Riverside, and joined CUAHSI's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee, which was new at the time. As part of the Committee’s initiatives, I worked with colleagues across the country to revisit the criteria for some of CUAHSI's student grants with the intention of increasing engagement with underrepresented groups in the water science community.
That work led to an invitation to join the Board of Directors, and I became a board member in January 2023. I eagerly accepted this opportunity to serve our community as I deeply believe in CUAHSI's mission. As a faculty member, I had already benefited from CUAHSI's webinar series, long-form lectures on the latest research in our field, recorded and made freely accessible to the community. Furthermore, during the challenges of the pandemic, the teaching materials generously shared by members of our community via CUAHSI platforms became an invaluable resource for navigating the sudden shift to online instruction. My first board task was contributing to CUAHSI's strategic plan, a two-day exercise dedicated to thinking deeply about the future of water science and how CUAHSI could help shape it. Since then, I've served as a Board of Director liaison for the Education and Outreach Committee, worked on revising CUAHSI's governance and bylaws, and served on the Executive Committee. This journey has shown me how expansive CUAHSI’s impact is beyond education. Especially as funding environments shift, our Board spends real time thinking about how to keep organizations like CUAHSI sustainable, and how to bring more of the community into that conversation.
Looking ahead, I think CUAHSI's role will keep evolving with the needs of our field. What started as a vital infrastructure for data repositories and sharing is rapidly transforming into a broader ecosystem for moving toward open science, reproducibility, and advanced computational infrastructure for teaching and research in hydrologic science. It's an exciting shift to navigate. As I step into the role of chair, I hope we can grow CUAHSI's membership and deepen involvement across the entire water science community.
CUAHSI's real strength is convening the community, and bringing people together. I've relied on that myself, whether applying for proposals or sharing a new tool through CUAHSI’s open-data repository. At the same time, we shouldn't lose sight of CUAHSI's vital role in supporting field-based data collection and instrumentation. Programs like the Water Prediction Innovators Summer Institute and Snow Measurement Field School have been successful for years, and I hope funding agencies and individual investigators continue to support these resources.
CUAHSI has played a major role in advancing hydrologic science over the past 25 years. I don't know of another organization with this kind of reach, across convening conferences, hosting webinars, offering courses through CUAHSI Virtual University, providing educational resources, and computational tools. As we navigate this new era of big data and AI, I hope our community continues to value this service. More importantly, I hope they continue to share their evolving needs with us so that, together, we can strategically shape what CUAHSI delivers over the next 25 years.
Hoori Ajami is a Professor of Groundwater Hydrology in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. Her research uses observational data and modeling tools to understand hydrologic processes, including groundwater recharge, surface water-groundwater interactions, and land surface processes at the catchment scale.