Dr. Sitara Parveen
External Advisor — Cryosphere and Socio-Hydrology
Associate Professor at Fatima Jinnah Degree College for Women, Gilgit, with a Heidelberg doctorate on glacier change and irrigation in Gilgit-Baltistan. She works on cryosphere dynamics and water security across the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Himalaya.
Dr. Sitara Parveen is ClimateWatch's External Advisor on Cryosphere and Socio-Hydrology.
She is Associate Professor at Fatima Jinnah Degree College for Women in Gilgit, where she has taught geography since 2000, with more than twenty-five years of teaching and research experience. She earned her doctorate at the University of Heidelberg with research on glacier change and its effects on local irrigation systems in Gilgit-Baltistan, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon studying the region's traditional glacier grafting practices.
Her work covers cryosphere dynamics, snow and glacier-fed irrigation in the Karakoram and Himalaya, climate vulnerability and adaptation, and GIS and remote sensing. She has published on cryosphere-fed irrigation networks in Mountain Research and Development and on socio-hydrological change in Upper Hunza in Erdkunde, and contributed to the Earth's Future horizon-scanning exercise that identified the top hundred research questions on climate and water in the Upper Indus Basin.
She advises ClimateWatch on the cryosphere and mountain water systems: the technical accuracy of its glacier and water analysis, and the design of the Glacier School curriculum.
Areas of expertise
- Cryosphere dynamics in the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Himalaya
- Glacier- and snow-fed irrigation systems
- Socio-hydrology and human-environment interaction
- Climate vulnerability and community adaptation
- GIS and remote sensing