A native of Puerto Rico, Rafael L. Bras is a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds the K. Harrison Brown Family Chair.
Dr. Bras was provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to becoming provost, Dr. Bras was Distinguished Professor and Dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering of the University of California, Irvine (UCI). For 32 years prior he was a professor in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. He is past Chair of the MIT Faculty, former head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering department and Director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory at MIT.
Dr. Bras has served as advisor to government and private institutions. Some of the most significant include: Advisory Board, Engineering Directorate, NSF; Board of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, NRC; Chairman, Earth Systems Sciences and Applications Committee and the NASA Advisory Committee; NAS Committee on New Orleans Regional Hurricane Protection Projects. He has been an advisor to departments at Cornell, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Technion, RPI, University of Puerto Rico, UCI; and to the Instituto Veneto, Stockholm Water Foundation and Prize, and Clarke prize. He was a director of AGU and member of the Board of Trustees of UCAR. He served on the Coursera University Advisory Board and the Blackboard Advisory Council. He is an emeritus member of the board of Foundation for Puerto Rico. He has served in the Board of Directors of Fundación Chile and the trustees of the UCI Foundation. He was a member of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board. Ongoing external service roles include the President’s Council of the U. of Illinois; Nominations Committee of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Council of Engineering Companies Research Institute Advisory Board, the US President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science and the Georgia Tech Research Institute External Advisory Council and the Fulbright Scholar Advisory Board.
Dr. Bras is a hydrologist, hydrometerologist and ecohydrologist. His interests are broadly in understanding land-atmosphere interactions as mediated by soils and vegetation. Most of his work uses satellite observations of Earth surface processes and fluxes, particularly soil moisture and rainfall. He has made key contributions in: uncertainty characterization and stochastic representation of hydro-climatic processes and data; optimal design of data acquisition networks for hydro-climatic processes; optimal assimilation of real-time observational data for the adaptive estimation of operational hydro-meteorological forecasting models; flood and drought forecasting and management; soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions in the water cycle; integrative modeling and improved prediction of hydro-climatic processes at regional and global scales; universality and scale-invariance (fractality) of natural river networks; modeling of landscape evolution; co-evolution of hydrology, natural vegetation, landscape topography, and drainage networks; dynamic simulation of landscape uplift and fluvial erosion; global warming and climate change; climate impacts of large-scale deforestation and land use change.
1. ScD Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1975
2. MS Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1974
3. BSCE Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1972
Dr. Bras created a graduate student class in eco-hydrology. His present teaching interests are in leadership development. He leads the Faculty Executive Leadership Academy (FELA), the 1-year Graduate Leadership Academy (GLAD) for graduate students in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and teaches a freshman transition seminar with focus on leadership.
Beale, K., R.L. Bras, J. Romberg, Low Rank Gap-Filling and Downscaling for SMAP Soil Moisture Datasets, Ecohydrology, 18(3), https://doi.org/10.1002/eco.70024, April 2025
Soylu, M.E., R.L. Bras, Quantifying and valuing irrigation in energy and water limited agroecosystems, Journal of Hydrology X, 22 (2024) 100169, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hydroa.2023.100169
Zhang J., M. Longo, T. Heartsill-Scalley, R.L. Bras, Future Hurricanes will Increase Palm Abundance and Decrease Aboveground Biomass in a Tropical Forest, Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL100090, 2022
Zhang J., T. Heartsill-Scalley, R.L. Bras, Forest Structure and Composition Are Critical to Hurricane Mortality, Forests 13 (2), 202, 2022
Zhang J., T. Heartsill-Scalley, R.L. Bras, Parsing Long-Term Tree Recruitment, Growth, and Mortality to Identify Hurricane Effects on Structural and Compositional Change in a Tropical Forest, Forests 13 (5), 796, 2022
Zhang J., R.L. Bras, M. Longo, T. Heartsill Scalley, The impact of hurricane disturbances on a tropical forest: implementing a palm plant functional type and hurricane disturbance module in ED2-HuDi V1. 0, Geoscientific Model Development 15 (13), 5107-5126, 2022
Zhang, J., T. Heartsill-Scally, R. L. Bras, Forest Structure and Composition Are Critical to Hurricane Mortality, Forests 2022,13,202. https://doi.org/10.3390/10.3390/f13020202
M. E. Soylu and R.L. Bras, Global Shallow Groundwater Patterns from Soil Moisture Satellite Retrievals, IEEE, JSTARS, Journal acronym: JSTARS, DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2021.3124892
Ebtehaj A. M. and R.L. Bras, A Physically Constrained Inversion for High-Resolution Passive Microwave Retrieval of Soil Moisture and Vegetation Water Content in L-Band, Remote Sensing of Environment, Vol 233, November 2019, 111346, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.111346
Dialynas, Y. and R.L. Bras, Hydro-geomorphic Behavior of Contrasting Tropical Landscapes and Critical Zone Response to Changing Climate, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, DOI: 10.1002/esp.4503, Vol 44, no. 2, Feb. 2019
Professor Rafael Bras—who honed his leadership skills as the former provost and executive vice president of academic affairs for Georgia Tech — is most passionate about sharing lessons on leadership to students of all ages these days.
Three faculty members received the University System of Georgia’s highest recognition for academic, research, and innovation excellence at the August meeting of the Board of Regents. Rafael Bras was named a Regents’ Professor, M. Talat Odman a Regents’ Researcher, and J. David Frost a Regents’ Entrepreneur.
K. Harrison Brown Family Chair and Professor Rafael L. Bras has joined a group of distinguished artists, thinkers, and scientists as a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an organization that dates to the early days of the United States.
