Jordan Read

Jordan Read (he/him) is the Chief Executive Officer of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), a nonprofit of 101 US university members that runs shared data and computing systems for water science, including HydroShare, and delivers training, workshops, and meetings that bring the water research community together across institutions. He sets CUAHSI's strategy, builds its partnerships, and is responsible for keeping the organization on a sustainable footing.

Before joining CUAHSI in 2023, Jordan spent a decade at the U.S. Geological Survey, where he established and led the Water Data Science Branch. The branch brought machine learning together with physical understanding of rivers and lakes, and it built the data pipelines and reproducible workflows that let a federal science agency deliver forecasts and predictions at national scale. That work included process-guided deep learning models of lake temperature, near-term forecasts of stream temperature to support water management decisions, and daily surface temperature estimates for more than 185,000 lakes across the United States.

His research background is in environmental fluid mechanics and lake physics. He has published on lake warming around the globe, on the controls of gas exchange across lake surfaces, and on community-built tools for sharing and analyzing data in environmental observing networks. His current writing and speaking focus on how AI agents are changing the way scientific work gets done, who is accountable for its credibility, and what that means for the people and organizations that do water science.

Jordan holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (Environmental Fluid Mechanics) and a B.S. in Civil Engineering, both from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He lives in Wisconsin.