Written by Meghan Hanley
Ames, Iowa – The Iowa Water Center (IWC) annually administers a statewide grant competition known as the IWC Graduate Student Supplemental Research Competition.
The purpose of this funding is to help graduate students complete additional research objectives beyond the scope of their current work, with an emphasis on submitting their research to peer-reviewed publications.
Navid Jadidoleslam has been selected, along with three other graduate students across Iowa, as recipients for this year’s grant competition. Each recipient will receive funding for various different research studies.
Jadidoleslam’s proposed research is focused around developing software to improve the way hydrologic data are visualized and published. This new open-source software is named Hydrovise.
The goal behind Hydrovise is to make the process of hydrologic data visualization and analysis more user friendly. Hydrovise allows users to assess data in space, time and variable data cubes – without using a database. This software enables users to visualize time-series and geospatial data with minimal effort or background knowledge on web development. Hydrovise is a tool for communicating hydrologic data in an interactive and transparent way. Users can easily visualize and publish hydrologic datasets in Open Data journals or alongside their publications as well.
Hydrovise is an open-source code published under MIT license terms. You can learn more about Hydrovise here.
Get to know Navid Jadidoleslam, a PhD student at the University of Iowa.
Jadidoleslam is originally from Tabriz, Iran where he earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering in 2012. He then started his master’s degree at Istanbul Technical University, where his studies focused on hydraulic and water resources engineering. After obtaining his master’s, Jadidoleslam researched different PhD programs at universities in the U.S. and chose the University of Iowa due to the Iowa Institute for Hydraulic Research’s (IIHR) esteemed reputation in water resources engineering.
Jadidoleslam works at the Iowa Flood Center, intending to continue his research in academia in the hydroscience field. He felt as though the IWC Graduate Student Research Competition would be a great opportunity for him to gain practice in grant proposal writing and to learn the procedure that goes along with the application process. This ultimately led him to apply for the IWC’s annual funding program.
One aspect of Jadidoleslam’s proposal topic that interests him the most is the visual representation of data in an interactive way that can provide more understanding of hydrologic data and the models that go along with the research.
Jadidoleslam also shared that his favorite part of the research process is the continuous learning that occurs. The hydrologic data and models are constantly evolving with the availability of new satellite-based remote sensing platforms. He explained that he tries to learn more by doing a variety of projects under the main research focus in his studies, and he enjoys sharing his work and results with his peers.
In Jadidoleslam’s down time, he has an interest in photography that stems from his childhood. He enjoys taking landscape photographs while he experiences different aspects of nature. Jadidoleslam also takes delight in cooking, baking bread, singing and playing guitar.