View source for Wallis, Jim

== Biography ==
Jim Wallis, former Hydrology Section President, AGU Fellow, and the force behind foundational work in synthetic hydrology and flood frequency analysis (most of which appeared in WRR) passed away in Florida on February 13, 2016.  Jim was born of English parents in Montreal.  His family moved back to England in the 1930s, where he grew up in wartime London before being evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz in the early 1940s.  He returned to Canada in 1946 to pursue an interest in forestry, which he studied at the University of New Brunswick, graduating in 1950.  In the early 1950s, he worked as a logger in the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia (there being no jobs for degreed foresters).  In 1953, he entered the MS program in Forestry at Oregon State University, and went on to do his Ph.D. studies at UC Berkeley from 1958-65, working on the side at Pacific Gas and Electric in San Francisco, where he was motivated to learn about operations research and the use of digital computers.  He became interested in the erodibility of forest soils (Wallis and Stevan, JGR 1961, “Erodibility of some California wildland soils related to their metallic cation exchange capacity”) which became his dissertation topic.  Following completion of his Ph.D., he was awarded a Bullard Fellowship at Harvard University (a postdoc in today’s terms), from 1965-66 with Harold E. Thomas.  He then joined IBM’s Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1966 as part of its nascent Environmental Sciences Program, where he stayed until he retired to join the Yale Climate and Energy Institute.