David Lesmes

Dr. David Lesmes is the Water Prediction Work Program (2WP) Manager in the Water Mission Area (WMA). He reports to the Office of the Associate Director for Water. 2WP is a large scale program to develop a multi-agency Federal Water Prediction Capability to address critical societal problems such as water availability, flood hazards, harmful algal blooms and hypoxia, and invasive species. The program has many internal and external complexities and dependencies that will require this position to work with executives, managers, and technical staff at USGS, DOI and its bureaus, and other Cabinet level agencies such as the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Energy. In this position, David provides leadership and direction in the planning, development and implementation of water science and information programs for 2WP.

David joined WMA from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research where he managed the Subsurface Biogeochemical Research (SBR) program in the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division. At the DOE, David utilized a complex system science approach, encouraging SBR researchers to work in interdisciplinary teams across many different National Laboratories and institutions, to advance basic understanding of watershed system functioning and to develop core scientific capacities (e.g., High Performance Computing modeling tools, analytical capabilities, community data archives, and field research sites) that can become resources for the broader watershed system science community. David’s technical area of expertise is in hydrogeophysics. Before joining DOE he worked as an Assistant Professor at Boston College and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David received a PhD in Geophysics from Texas A&M University and a B.A. in Physics from the University of California at San Diego. He has served on many interagency committees including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Subcommittee on Water Quality and Availability (SWAQ), the Community Advisory Committee for Water Prediction (CAC-WP), the U.S. Group on Earth Observations (USGEO), and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) Integrated Water Cycle Working Group.