Zhuo Liu, Compound Flooding Research Specialist, has years of experience connecting research advancements to the development of products that can be used by communities for better climate adaptation and mitigation planning and preparation.

Prior to joining The Water Institute, Liu was data science manager and tech lead at One Concern, Inc. where he led the research, development, and implementation of a coupled physics modeling and machine learning compound flood prediction system that covered the entire country of Japan, supporting emergency managers in more than 100 cities.

Specializing in blending research into data science, and development into widely useable tools, Liu’s work focuses on modeling and data analysis around compound flooding (driven by storm surge, river flow, and rainfall) and climate change resilience.

His experience includes researching, developing, and operationalizing end-to-end cloud-based compound flood (coastal and inland floods) forecasting pipelines including weather forecast ingestors, flood alert systems, hydrological models, hydrodynamic models, and geospatial visualizations. In addition, he has more than a decade of experience in compound flood and climate change modeling as well as experience in processing large data sets, creating complex data workflows, performing time series and geospatial analysis/visualization, and setting up cloud computing.

Liu received his bachelor’s degree in marine technology from Xiamen University and his Ph.D. in physical oceanography from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary.