Biography: Doug Alsdorf and his research team study the Congo and Amazon Basins and their massive wetlands. They are focused on understanding the enormous flux of water moving through these systems and the relationship of the water to flooding, ecology, and global change. Key methods involve spaceborne measurements of water surface elevations.  Doug Alsdorf is an alumnus of The Ohio State University, has a Ph.D. from Cornell University's Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department, and is a Full Professor in OSU's School of Earth Sciences. He has published 80 peer-reviewed journal articles including four in Nature and Science and three in Reviews of Geophysics (the highest impact earth science journal); and he has won several millions of dollars in external funding.  He co-edited the AGU Geophysical Monograph "Congo Basin Hydrology, Climate, and Biogeochemistry: A Foundation for the Future".  This monograph is a bilingual first-ever for AGU. The monograph includes 28 chapters with 109 authors, 40 of whom live and research in sub-Saharan Africa. Each chapter was independently peer-reviewed by two external referees and thus there are over 50 referees involved. The English version is 600 pages and likewise the French version is 600 pages.

Teaching:  For the past two decades, Prof. Alsdorf has taught thousands of undergraduates in courses on Introductory Earth Science.  More recently, for the past six years he has taught more than a hundred first-year students in a one-credit course on personal finance.