Texas A&M AgriLife Research has awarded Blackland’s Resident Director Dr. Raghavan Srinivasan the prestigious title of Senior Faculty Fellow. AgriLife Research established the Faculty Fellows Program in 1998 to recognize exceptional scholarly contributions and research leadership of its faculty. An individual who has previously been named a Faculty Fellow may after five years be considered for title of Senior Faculty Fellow, based on his or her work over the most recent five years.

Dr. Srinivasan has received numerous accolades for his developmental work in spatial sciences and computer-based modeling. His outstanding scholarship and innovation in Spatial Decision Support Systems have fundamentally advanced natural resource assessments and development of management system options. He is perhaps best known for his global leadership and advances, in cooperation with USDA-ARS, in the development, dissemination, and applications of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), now used in more than 90 countries.

Over the past five years, Dr. Srinivasan has continued his important work in developing SWAT and SWAT+, along with GIS interfaces and worldwide databases, now used by more than 8,000 graduate students around the world. Federal agencies such as USDA-ARS, NRCS, USEPA, USDOE, USCOE and USGS use the model for various policy, economic and environmental analyses. In January of 2021, Dr. Srinivasan also began work on a powerful time-saving tool to model any watershed for the lower 48 states using the SWAT model.

Between 2018 and 2022, Dr. Srinivasan secured almost $7 million in funding for his research, bringing his total since 1992 to over $25.5 million. In this same period, he published 131 refereed articles and 36 conference papers and gave 18 invited presentations. Named by Clarivate in 2018 as one of the Highly Cited Researchers in the world, he has been cited more than 27,000 times since 2018.

Dr. Srinivasan’s contributions to the University and to his field have earned him multiple honors in the past five years alone. Since 2018, Dr. Srinivasan has also been appointed to the Neville P. Clarke ’54 Endowed Chair and named a University Distinguished Professor. He received the Asian Institute of Technology Distinguished Alumni Award and the TAMU Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award for Research and was elected as Fulbright Research Chair in Environmental Studies to conduct research with faculty at University of Regina, Canada. Most recently, under Dr. Srinivasan’s leadership, Blackland and Texas A&M AgriLife Research (in partnership with USDA-ARS Grassland Soil and Water Research Lab and USDA-NRCS Conservation Effects Assessment Project) were awarded the 2023 Texas Environmental Excellence Award – Technical/Technology by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).

By developing and providing training for modeling tools, by leading efforts to compile and disseminate the most comprehensive and accurate datasets available, through his own research and by directing research towards data-scarce regions, Dr. Srinivasan continues to advance environmentally sustainable agricultural production and conservation practices in the U.S. and globally.