Jay Famiglietti is a pioneering satellite hydrologist and a Global Futures Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, where he is Chief Scientist of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. As Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, he led Canada’s top freshwater research program. Before moving to Canada, he served as Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology; he was a professor in Earth System Science and in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine; and he was a professor in Geological Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Jay and his team use satellites to track changing freshwater availability and water risk across the globe. They developed the groundbreaking methods to detect groundwater depletion from space using the NASA GRACE mission.
Jay has been researching and communicating about water and climate change — in academics, in business, in government and to the general public — for over 30 years. He has appeared on CBS News 60 Minutes, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and as a featured expert in water documentaries including “Day Zero” and “Last Call at the Oasis”. Jay is a frequent speaker and he is an avid writer for the general public. His research and commentary are often featured in the international news media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist, and the Harvard Business Review, and in network, cable and public television news. Jay is a regular guest on National Public Radio, BBC Radio, CBC Radio and other public radio shows. He is the host of the “What About Water” water and climate science communication podcast.
Other of Jay’s film and television credits include the PBS 3-part documentary “H2O: The Molecule That Made Us“, Jigsaw Productions’ documentary “Water and Power: A California Heist,” VICE , and Years of Living Dangerously. He was a story consultant on the National Geographic Channel water documentary series “Parched.“ Most recently Jay appeared in the diwafilm water documentaries Bis zum letzten Tropfen – Die Doku (To the Last Drop – The Documentary), the documentary mini-series Durst – Wenn unser Wasser verschwindet (Thirst: When our Water Disappears), and their translations into English by DW Documentary.
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Jay Famiglietti 