Hi, I am Yannis Markonis, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Sciences of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague and Guarantor of Bachelor of Environmental Data Science. My research focuses on the multi-scale variability of water cycle and its interaction with climate. Particular topics of interest are the extreme European drought events, the long-term changes in Europe’s hydroclimate and whether global water cycle has been intensified due to global warming. Another promising research path is the study of water cycle beyond our planet. The SCHEMATA project (Synthetic and Comparative Hydrology of Earth, MArs and TitAn) aims to improve our understanding of the processes involved in the liquid element cycles of other planetary bodies.
In this astonishing journey of scientific exploration, I am not alone. Here are some excellent young researchers that I am currently working with.
Rajani Kumar Pradhan is a Ph.D. fellow in our Faculty. As a Junior Research Fellow at Banaras Hindu University, India, he gained experience in downscaling future projections to infer extreme events. His research interests are remote sensing of precipitation, hydrological cycle, extreme events and the impact of climate change on water resources. Currently, he is working with the GPM IMERG dataset to study the behavior of precipitation over oceans.
Mijael Vargas is a physicist by training with strong 
math skills. As a Ph.D. fellow in the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, he aims to quantify the main components of the global water cycle. His main focus is precipitation and evaporation and their response to climatic change. In the past, he has been working with remote sensing data, GIS and machine learning tools.
Sadaf Nasreen, graduated in 2014 with a master’s degree in Mathematical modeling and scientific computing from Air University, Islamabad Pakistan. She has also a postgraduate diploma degree on Earth system physics and now she is pursuing a Ph.D. in our Faculty. Her research is about hydrological modelling, spatio-temporal analysis of historical droughts and palaeoclimate data analysis.
Akif Ra
him has about 8 years of research and consultancy experience in water resources engineering and management sector. As a Ph.D. fellow in our Faculty, he studies the occurrence and propagation of the so-called ‘flash droughts’ in Europe. His broader areas of research are hydraulics, applied hydrology, hydroinformatics and water resources management.
Shailendra Pratap is performing research in the intensification of global water cycle. In his Ph.D., he investigates extreme states of past climates to demystify how climate variability and water cycle interact. Before joining our Faculty, he had been working for three years on hydrometeorological applications of WRF as a fellow of Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship (RGNF).
Nikola Šeborová, graduated in 2019 with a master’s degree in 
Environmental Modeling from Czech University of Life Science, Prague. She currently works at SpaceKnow, a satellite intelligence company based in Prague. Her duties involve data analysis and data science using remote sensing data. For her Ph.D. studies she focuses on data mining and machine learning forecasting in hydrology.
Vojtěch Cuřín graduated with a master’s degree in Physical Geography from the Charles University in Prague, where he studied various components of the cryosphere. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences. He focuses on comparative planetary hydrology utilizing remote sensing imagery and machine learning methods.
If you would like to learn more about our research activities, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Water & Climate 