Sameer Dhakal

IGC FELLOW    |   Global Change Center

Ph.D. Student  •  Civil and Environmental Engineering

Advisor: Dr. Landon Marston

Research Interests: Human-Water Systems, Water Governance, Socio-Hydrology, and Agent-based modeling

sameerdhakal@vt.edu • LinkedIn • Google Scholar

Sameer is pursuing a PhD in Civil Engineering with a concentration in environmental and water resources engineering. He is a part of the Marston Research Group and is advised by Dr. Landon Marston to explore the interactions between water and society. His research focuses on examining various water governance schemes and their implications for the economy at the community level.

Sameer graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering in 2021 from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. After graduation, he worked on a couple of research projects in his home country that had potential policy-level implications. In the first, he studied the impacts of climate change on low flows in one of Nepal’s major river basins. In the second, as a research intern at the Global Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, he investigated land-use and land-cover changes in Nepal’s major cities from 1990 to 2020.

Continuing his academic journey, Sameer joined Virginia Tech as a PhD student. His current research evaluates the equity and effectiveness of various groundwater governance policy instruments, aimed at sustaining groundwater resources and stabilizing aquifers. By employing an agent-based model that captures human-water interactions and socio-economic outcomes, he seeks to understand how different policies influence farmers’ decisions and incomes. Additionally, Sameer is working in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to derive crop irrigation water requirements for the major river basins in the United States.

As an IGC Fellow, Sameer aims to draw on the diverse perspectives of fellows from various disciplines and develop the soft and hard skills needed to address environmental challenges on a global scale. He hopes that the unique features of the IGC IGEP program will provide a solid foundation for achieving his goal of facilitating decision-making processes around environmental sustainability in the face of global change.