UA Hydrology and Climate Expert Appointed Regents Professor
“William James Shuttleworth has been bestowed the honor of Regents’ Professor,” announced Professor Tom Maddock, head of the Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, on Feb. 20.
Jim Shuttleworth joined the Department of Hydrology & Water Resources in 1993, and is also a faculty member in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. He was director of the Center for Sustainability of Semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas, known as SAHRA, from 2004 to 2008.
Shuttleworth noted that “academic awards are usually made by peers who know your contribution to your field, and I am proud to have received some of these in the past. But being awarded a Regents’ Professorship is different. Selection is by those who also know you as a person. It is all the more satisfying because of this.”
Before joining the Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, he was head of the Hydrological Processes Division at the UK’s Institute of Hydrology, a public sector research center.
Much of Shuttleworth’s research focuses on how climate change is affected by land surfaces. He is particularly interested in changes in global climate caused by deforestation in the Amazon basin and desert formation in Africa.
Shuttleworth is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and Royal Meteorological Society, and he holds a doctorate (PhD) in high-energy nuclear physics and a higher doctorate (DSc) from the University of Manchester in the UK.
Commenting on the role played by the Arizona Board of Regents in selecting Regents’ Professors, Shuttleworth said it enabled the board to “highlight aspects of the successful UA enterprise.” He added: “But really we are just the tip of the iceberg. It is a joy to be part of a university that has quality in depth across such an amazingly broad spectrum of excellence.”
He serves on committees for the International Council of Scientific Unions, the International Hydrology Programme, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Project, the World Climate Research Programme and the International Pacific Research Center.
Shuttleworth is a lifetime member of the British Hydrological Society and the European Geophysical Society. He is a former National Research Council Senior Research Fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Fellow of the Udall Center for Public Policy.
He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Hydrology and the Journal of Hydrological Sciences. In 2001, he was awarded the American Geophysical Union Hydrology Prize for “outstanding contributions to the science of hydrology.” In 2006 he got the International Hydrology Prize in recognition of his “innovative, international leadership over more than thirty years, contributing to the growth of hydrology into a major discipline of earth system science.”
Among Shuttleworth’s many advisory roles are stints on several National Research Council committees, including the Panel on the Global Ocean Atmosphere Land System, and a six-year term on the Committee on Global Change Research. He currently serves on the NRC’s Climate Research Committee, the U.S. National Committee of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, the U.S. National Committee of the International Hydrology Program, and the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Large-scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia.