Ezatollah Raeisi: Iran’s foremost professor of hydrogeology

Abstract

The contribution of scientists born in Iran to both hydrological and hydrogeological sciences is substantial. However, one can call Prof. Ezatollah (Ezzat) Raeisi (pictured in Fig. 1), from Shiraz University, the father of groundwater hydrology in the country. He was born in 1944 in Ardekan, a small city in Fars province in southern Iran. With the exception of his PhD study, which was at Colorado State University, Fort Collins (USA), and a short period at Iran’s Scientific Research Centre, Prof. Raeisi has spent his entire academic career of 46 years, continuing to the present, at Shiraz University. Prof. Raeisi spent his periods of sabbatical leave, about nine months each, as visiting professor at the Mississippi State University (1995–1996) and the Western Kentucky University (2003–2004) in the USA. Similar to many high-profile hydrogeologists such as P. Witherspoon and W. B. White from the USA, Prof. Raeisi did not study geology as an undergraduate student. He completed his BSc (in 1968) and MSc (in 1970) in irrigation sciences at the Faculty of Agriculture, Shiraz University; then he switched to hydrology for his PhD studies at Colorado State University. This is why his first papers appeared in agricultural journals (e.g. Sepaskhah and Raeisi 1978). In 1984, he was employed as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences of Shiraz University; after 12 years he was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1996. In this institution, Prof. Raeisi formed a solid hydrogeology team and developed the curriculum for MSc and PhD studies in this field. He founded the MSc program in hydrogeology in 1988 and the PhD program in 1998. He has, so far, supervised more than 40 MSc and PhD students, a very valuable side-product of his extensive research career. His former students are now faculty members of a number of Iranian universities—e.g. Shahrood University of Technology, Shahid Beheshti University (Tehran), Tarbiat Moallem University (Tehran)—and senior research officers of consulting companies and government departments, and some are working in foreign countries in their field of expertise. Prof. Raeisi is a rather practical fellow. He has carried out countless research and consultancy projects. Excluding recently awarded grants, he has been successful in attracting funds for 13 large projects. The economic value of these grants is very high, especially when considering the economic situation and the low per capita gross domestic product for Iran (International Monetary Fund 2009). During his academic career, Prof. Raeisi has mainly focused on three different fields. Karst hydrogeology, especially around dam sites, is the first field which has been explored by Prof. Raeisi and his team (e.g. Raeisi et al. 1996; Ashjari and Raeisi 2006; Mohammadi et al. 2007a). Along these lines, one of his latest publications discusses the calculation of groundwater storage in karst aquifers with various types of boundaries without the need to drill boreholes (Raeisi 2008). Dye tracing for detection of leakage from dams forms his second area of research— note that Iran is said to rank among the first countries in the world in the field of dam construction (Khorasanizadeh 2008). In this regard, he has applied some basic research results to evaluate water tightness in several dam reservoirs in karstic regions (e.g. Mohammadi and Raeisi 2007; Mohammadi et al. 2007b, c; Karimi et al. 2007). Evaluation of karst springs based on the water-chemical composition and application of artificial tracers, as a way to understand groundwater behavior in karst regions, forms the third portion of Prof. Raeisi’s research (e.g. Raeisi and Karami 1997; Raeisi et al. 1999; Karimi et al. 2005). This approach, which was the focus of his early work, is now an established and widely adopted method of karst hydrology in Iran. In addition to the aforementioned three main fields, one of his former research areas was the characterization of caves in Iran (e.g. Raeisi and Kowsar 1997; Raeisi and Mylroie 1995), which led to the publication of a book, Iran Cave Directory, now in its second edition (Raeisi and Laumanns 2009). Prof. Raeisi has also touched on most other branches of hydrogeology such as artificial recharge (e.g. Raeisi and Koohyan 1998; Raeisi and Kowsar 1998), partial and full pipe flow Received: 7 June 2010 /Accepted: 15 November 2010