Short Bio

Dr. Piasecki received his Diploma in Civil Engineering from the University of Hannover in Germany 1990. His interest on Fluid Mechanics, Hydraulics and Hydrology was formed through his 4 year employment as an UG researcher at the Institute for Computational Hydraulics. During this time he got introduced to large scale eco systems modeling; a first exposure to issues related to HydroInformatics such as High Performance Computing and Data Management.

After 15 months of mandatory services (civil service in Heidelberg, Germany) he joined the University of Michigan (advisor Nikolaos Katopodes) to pursue his Ph.D. in 1991, which he received in 1994. Following 2 years as a Post-Doctoral researcher at Michigan he took his first faculty appointment at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon where he stayed from 1996 - 1998. He returned to the US in 1998 to accept a faculty position at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where he worked until 2010. He is now an Associate Professor at the City College of New York working with colleagues in City University of New York's  Environmental CrossRoads Initiative on environmental issues pertaining to the Global Water Cycle and Environmental Systems of MegaCities, and also on aspects of Sustainable Infrastructure and Water Resources development in the Caribbean.  

During his time at Drexel he shifted his research from large scale numerical simulations of ecological systems (surface water) to a new research interest that centers on hydroinformatics. More specifically he focuses on the development of data management strategies for the hydrologic community as well the creation and representation of hydrologic processes and vocabularies using ontologies. Of special interest is the problem of semantic heterogeneity in the description of processes and data files and the utilization of ontologies to overcome these heterogeneities. Dr. Piasecki has been a member of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), Hydrologic Information Systems team developing a prototype information system of the hydrologic community, where he took the lead on developing a global search engine, semantic mediation approaches, metadata development, and controlled vocabularies for use in the information system.

He is the recipient of a number of other cyberinfrastructure (CI) development projects addressing CI and education as well as CI test bed grants. As part of his community involvement and recognition for his expertise, he is a member of the CI advisory committee for the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network; has been invited to numerous workshops on CI development organized by the environmental observing system communities and the U.S. National Science Foundation.  

He is a member of the International Association of Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research, IAHR, and the American Geophysical Union, AGU. In both organizations he has had leadership position, i.e. he was the vice chair of the IAHR HydroInformatics Committee and was the Chair of the Earth Space Science Informatics (ESSI) focus group of AGU. He also serves as the Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Water Engineering and Research and Earth Science Informatics Journal. He is also a member of the Engineers Without Border USA, EWB, and has, in this capacity, been the co-advisor of the Drexel University Chapter of EWB in the past and is now the Advisor for the EWB chapter at CCNY. He is also a member of the Professors Beyond Borders organization.