Dr. Altaf Ali Siyal
Prof. Dr. Altaf Ali Siyal is currently working as a Dean Faculty of Agricultural Engineering, Sindh Agriculture University Tandojam. He has also acted as Chairman of the Department of Land and Water Management and the Director of ORIC at Sindh Agriculture University Tandojam, Pakistan. He has also served for five years at the U.S.-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water, Mehran University of Engineering & Technology Jamshoro. In 2011, he got Endeavour Research Fellowship funded by t h e Australian Government for Post-Doctoral Research on ‘Soil Water and Crop Environment’ at CSIRO-ATSIP, Townsville, Australia. Dr. Siyal was also awarded Fulbright Fellowship to conduct Post-Doctoral Research on ‘Subsurface Irrigation Simulations’ at the University of California and the USDA-ARS Salinity Laboratory in Riverside, the USA, during 2007-8. He got his Ph.D. in 2001 from Cranfield University, the United Kingdom (UK), on ‘Maximising salt leaching efficiency of aggregated clay saline soils’ under the Quaid-e-Azam Merit Scholarship funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan. He earned his Master’s degree in Irrigation & Drainage in 1998 and Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Engineering in 1990 from the Sindh Agriculture University Tandojam, Sindh, Pakistan.
Dr. Siyal has expertise in Remote Sensing Applications, GIS, Climate Change, Environment, Water Resources Engineering & Management, Irrigation and Drainage, Soil Salinity, Land Reclamation, Wetlands, and Coastal Flood Management. He received training on ‘GIS and Remote Sensing Applications for the Water Sector’ from UNESCO-IHE, Delft Netherlands, under Netherlands Fellowship Program (NFP). He also got different training in GIS and Remote Sensing Applications in the Monitoring & Management of natural resources from the University of Maryland USA, under Borlaug Fellowship, NASA, and from SUPARCO, Pakistan. He has published more than 60 research articles in International Journals and written many on water, agriculture, and environment-related issues in local and national newspapers. He worked for Irrigation Department under the WSIP project and produced two study reports. He was also a consultant for Sindh Government on “Micro Irrigation Methods”. He has also been a “Flood and Coastal Management” consultant for Asian Development Bank (ADB) for the “Sindh Coastal Resilient Project.