Vijay K. Gupta is a professor emeritus in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, and is a fellow emeritus of the Cooperative Institute For Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. Vijay has widely published in major research journals in hydrologic and atmospheric sciences, applied mathematics, probability theory, and nonlinear processes in geophysics. Soon after completing his PhD in 1973, Vijay embarked upon highly interdisciplinary collaborative research. From the onset, he recognized the fundamental importance of Scale. It became a pervasive theme in all his work, which has uniquely ranged from the molecular to the planetary scales. His life-long collaboration with colleagues from many different disciplines and outstanding graduate students led to establishing the nonlinear geophysical foundations of floods in river networks on multiple space and time scales. The Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa is building on these foundations with new applications. Vijay modernized and developed a new graduate course over a decade titled “introduction to multi-scale hydrology”, which has continued to be taught at the University of Iowa. Vijay served on the editorial boards of prominent international journals, and on important national committees. He was invited as a keynote speaker in several national and international conferences and workshops, and gave seminars at well-known universities in USA, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Recently, Vijay and Indira established a non-profit international research institute bringing the cutting-edge research in modern and ancient sciences into a coherent whole. Their life-long interest and Indira’s background in psychiatry has brought the science of consciousness, mind and meditation at the forefront. This interconnectedness is necessary to address contemporary challenges of water and food shortages, health and health care crises, impact of climate change on floods and droughts etc.