USGS Monitoring for Regional Studies and Critical Events
Biography for Brian E. McCallum
Brian McCallum graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a bachelors (1991) and master’s degrees (1992) in civil engineering. He worked as a student in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Orlando, Florida office while still in school.
In 1993, he started full-time with the USGS Baton Rouge, Louisiana office, where he installed and operated an ALERT flood warning system and helped form the Louisiana HydroWatch, a statewide network of monitoring gages with products such as the first-ever Flood Tracking Chart.
In 2000, Brian became the Assistant Director of Hydrologic Monitoring for the USGS Georgia Water Science Center in Norcross, Georgia. The Georgia office was merged with the South Carolina and North Carolina offices in 2015, forming the South Atlantic Water Science Center, where Brian is now the Associate Director for Hydrologic Monitoring and oversees a program of more than 780 streamgages.
He has been active in the National Hydrologic Warning Council and the International Association of Emergency Managers. In February 1999, he was selected as the USGS Federal Engineer of the Year by the National Society of Professional Engineers. In May 2003, Brian was awarded the William A. Jump award that is given annually to one young Federal employee for exemplary service in Public Administration. In 2014, Brian was selected to participate in a mission to Brazil to analyze their streamgaging network and since then now leads the full program created with a Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Brazil.
One of Brian's professional passions is finding innovative ways to communicate the science of USGS. In addition to the Amite River Flood Tracking Chart that has a distribution of over 1 million copies, he helped guide the creation of the USGS NWISWeb data portal, shift the USGS away from the paper copies of the annual data report to an online version, and led the development team for the USGS WaterAlert and WaterNow notification tools. He also was the lead for the development of Flood Inundation Mapping products for the USGS in the Southeast, and has helped in the creation of the national storm-tide monitoring program that has deployed for hurricanes from Louisiana to New York City. This innovation spirit led him to be nominated for the USGS Science Strategy team for data integration.
Brian loves spending time with family, following Nebraska football, and traveling. He has been married since 1992 and has two daughters.