Y. C. Ethan Yang is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Lehigh University. He received a BS from the Department of Geography and an MS from Bio-Environmental Systems Engineering at National Taiwan University and a PhD from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign (2010). His research interests are water resources management, water-energy-food nexus, agent-based modeling, coupled natural and human complex systems, climate change risk assessment, Catastrophe modeling, smart stormwater management, hydro-ecology, and geographic information science.
Yang has led more than 15 research projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S, Department of Energy, the Work Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. These projects focus on various human-water systems issues in river basins of different sizes around the world. Yang received the NSF Early CAREER award in 2020 and he is an author and co-author for more than 50 peer-reviewed journal papers. Yang is a regular reviewer for top-ranking journals in water resources management and he serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management (American Society of Civil Engineers).