Genevieve Ali

Dr. Genevieve Ali is an Associate Professor, cross-appointed between the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and the Department of Geography at McGill University. She earned her B.Sc. (2005) and Ph.D. (2010) in environmental geography from the Université de Montréal and held research and faculty positions at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, United Kingdom), the University of Manitoba, and the University of Guelph before joining McGill in 2022. Dr. Ali’s research expertise includes runoff generation processes, contaminant export, landscape connectivity and watershed classification through the integration of field work, laboratory work, and modelling. With a focus on process hydrology, water quality and complex systems science, Dr. Ali’s research group examines not only forested watersheds but also human-dominated watersheds – where natural water and contaminant flow paths have been altered by surface drains, tile drains, storage ponds, farm dams, wetland drainage, and various agricultural practices. Her past and active research projects cover a range of spatial scales, from collecting soil moisture data in a single agricultural field to assess the impact of cover crops on soil water and nutrient transport, to synthesizing gridded climate data and remote sensing data to establish the relationship between precipitation and surface water inundation over entire provinces or large transboundary basins.

Dr. Ali is the former co-holder of a provincial research chair in watershed systems (Manitoba, Canada, 2012-2017) and the former deputy chair/chair of the American Geophysical Union Catchment Hydrology Technical Committee (2019-2023). She also served as an invited expert to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board (2013-2015), and she is a recipient of the Young Scientist Award of the Canadian Geophysical Union (2014). She currently holds editor roles for Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (since 2020) as well as Journal of Hydrology (since 2021), and she recently received a Wares Faculty Scholar Award (2024).