Member Profile: Professor Peter Eagleson, M.ASCE

Peter Eagleson, M.ASCE has been a member in good standing of ASCE since 1951.  He was a graduate of the Civil Engineering program at Lehigh University and graduated with a Sc.D from MIT’s civil program in 1956.  He remained at MIT as a professor.  For most others, one would say until retirement, however retirement never really seemed to be in the cards for Prof. Eagleson. 

Prof. Eagleson’s contributions to engineering and hydrology are bounded only by his far-ranging curiosity.  Areas of research that have benefited from that curiosity include currents and beach erosion, flood routing and recurrence intervals, catchment and global-scale hydrologic processes, and ecohydrology.  His good friend and colleague, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe described how Prof. Eagleson brought into hydrology “a scientific rigor that existed in more academically established disciplines.”  He was, said Rodriguez-Iturbe, “ideally suited to lead the field toward new approaches to old problems.”   These approaches included a combination of fluid mechanics, signal analysis, system dynamics, and stochastic methods.  In 2002, he turned his attention to ecohydrology and produced a well-received pioneering text (Ecohydrology: Darwinian Expression of Vegetation Form and Function) that addressed the “mechanisms by which natural selection influences vegetation form and function.”  In 2009, he single-handedly published another reference on interaction between climate and plant species, entitled the Range and Richness of Vascular Land Plants: The Role of Variable Light.

BSCES peers awarded Prof. Eagleson the Desmond Fitzgerald Medal in 1959 and the Clemens Herschel Prize in 1965.  He was also awarded the Research Prize of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1963.  In 1977, Prof. Eagleson delivered the BSCES Freeman Memorial Lecture at a series of five talks on advances in hydrology and published notes from that talk in the BSCES Civil Engineering Practice Journal.  Other prizes received in recognition of his many contributions to the profession include the Robert Horton Medal from the American Geophysical Union in 1988, and the World Water Prize from the Stockholm Water Institute in 1997.

I had the great fortune to be a student of Prof. Eagleson’s in 1986 and 1987.  At the time, he had already published widely on rainfall as a stochastic process, applied signal processing techniques to understanding of hydrographs, written a seminal text on hydrologic processes (Dynamic Hydrology), and a widely renowned set of papers on climate-soil interaction.  I was impressed at the time with the generosity of spirit by which he received and listened to students and encouraged their development as scientists and engineers.  At the time, Prof. Eagleson encouraged me to continue on in academic research.  Little did he know that I was a middling student, just barely hanging on to graduate with my MS and forever grateful for the opportunity to work with and learn from this creative powerhouse.