Tirtha Banerjee

Biography

Tirtha Banerjee, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (primary appointment) and the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on the science of wildland fires, including fire behavior modeling and fire-atmosphere interactions, as well as the modeling of forest-atmosphere exchange of mass, momentum, and energy through coupled biophysics and fluid dynamics approaches.

Banerjee received his Ph.D. from the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University in 2015, where his dissertation examined turbulence in natural environments. Prior to joining UCI, he held postdoctoral positions at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was named a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow. He has secured over $7 million in research funding as principal or co-principal investigator, including an NSF CAREER Award, a $3.6 million University of California Office of the President grant on prescribed fire practices, and multiple collaborative NSF grants on wildland fire behavior and fire-atmosphere interactions. He serves as a member of the ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on optimizing research on experimental prescribed fires, and was selected as a member of the Science Advisory Panel to the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force for the State of California. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Surrey, UK (2024–2025).

Banerjee was selected as a participant in the Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Symposium of the National Academy of Engineering, one of 74 early-career engineers chosen nationwide. He received the American Geophysical Union Global Environmental Change Early Career Award in 2025 for his work on wildland fire-vegetation-atmosphere interactions, and the American Meteorological Society Committee on Boundary Layers and Turbulence Outstanding Early Career Award in 2025. He is elected Vice-President of the ICCLAS Coupled Land-Atmosphere Systems Commission of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) and serves as Editor for Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. His research has been covered by outlets including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Good Morning America, and WIRED.

Education

• Ph.D. in Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University, 2015
• B.S. in Civil Engineering, Jadavpur University, 2011

Distinctions

• Selected Participant, Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
• AGU Global Environmental Change Early Career Award, 2025
• AMS Committee on Boundary Layers and Turbulence STAC Outstanding Early Career Award, 2025
• NSF CAREER Award, 2022
• Elected Vice-President, ICCLAS Coupled Land-Atmosphere Systems Commission, International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), 2023-present
• Visiting Fellowship, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Surrey, UK, 2024-2025
• Director's Postdoctoral Fellowship, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2018-2019
• Chick Keller Postdoctoral Fellowship in Climate Sciences, Center of Space and Earth Science, LANL, 2017
• Certificate in Nonlinear and Complex Systems, 2015
• National Academy of Sciences India (NASI) Award for best scientific article by undergraduate students, 2008
• Jadavpur University Medal for Excellence in Environmental Engineering, 2011
• DAAD WISE Fellowship (German Academic Exchange Service Working Internship in Science and Engineering), 2010