Fangni Lei

Assistant Research Professor

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Fangni Lei is an Assistant Research Professor in the Eversource Energy Center and is affiliated with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut. She has been utilizing various statistical methods to improve the quantification of hydrological variables, and the understanding of land-atmosphere interactions. She has published dozens of papers with many appearing in high-impact journals, including Nature Communications, Remote Sensing of Environment, Water Resources Research, etc. Her research topics include but are not limited to quantifying soil moisture from microwave remote sensing, land surface water-energy balance modeling, watershed-scale hydrologic modeling and hydrologic data assimilation, and agricultural water management.

Fangni completed her Bachelor, Master and Ph.D. degrees at Wuhan University, focusing on Geographic Information Systems. She was a visiting student at the Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory of USDA-ARS. After her Ph.D. training, she continued her research as a Post-doctoral Associate at USDA from 2017 to 2019 and then as Research Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University from 2019 to 2022.