Omar Abdelazeem (CivMin MASc 2T3), a CivMin PhD student, and his supervisor, Prof. David Meyer, are this year’s winners of the Reproducible Research Award from ASCE’s Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management.
The Environmental & Water Resources Institute (EWRI)’s Awards Committee selected Abdelazeem and Meyer to win this award for their paper titled, How to Model an Intermittent Water Supply: Comparing Modeling Choices and Their Impact on Inequality.
“My stellar PhD student led this field-shaping work that compares different ways of simulating the performance of intermittent water supply systems, which affect one in five piped water users around the world,” says Prof. Meyer. “Omar worked really hard to ensure his data and code were reproducible – enabling others to validate, replicate, and build on our work.”
A 2019 study found that less than 2% of research papers in top water and hydrology journals have results that are reproducible (Stagge et al., https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2019.30). This led to a renewed focus on reproducible results in the journal we published in (JWRP&M). That journal added a new (optional) step for papers called a reproducibility review – where a peer reviewer tries to reproduce the results using the provided data and methods. The results produced by the CivMin group were reproduced by Dr. Stagge himself as part of this reproducibility review.
The award will be presented at the 2025 World Environmental and Water Resources Congress in Anchorage, Alaska, May 18 – 21, 2025.