Research expertise, engineering judgment
Jykan Water Ltd. is an independent Ontario firm, incorporated in 2020 and led by Reza Najafi, PhD, P.Eng. His research and teaching at Western University inform the expertise he brings to consulting; the firm's commercial work is undertaken separately from his university responsibilities and is not endorsed by the university.
Reza Najafi, PhD, P.Eng.
President and principal engineer
Reza is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Western University, where he leads the Hydroclimate Extremes and Climate Change Lab and co-directs the Centre for Multi-Hazard Risk and Resilience. His work sits where climate science meets water engineering: how floods and other extremes are changing, how they combine, and what that means for the design and operation of infrastructure.
He is a licensed Professional Engineer in Ontario. Before his academic career he worked as a hydraulic modeller on dam outlets and spillways. Since then he has delivered contract work for a federal climate science department, a regional flood risk assessment team and a national standards organization, and has led flood hazard and risk projects for federal agencies, municipalities and international partners. He is an Associate Editor of Water Resources Research and of Weather and Climate Extremes, and has published more than eighty peer-reviewed journal articles.
At Jykan Water he leads every project personally, provides the technical oversight, and signs and seals engineering documents where the work requires it
- Professional Engineer, Ontario (P.Eng.)
- PhD, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Portland State University
- Associate Editor, Water Resources Research and Weather and Climate Extremes
- Lead author, Canada's national climate assessment (flood section of the freshwater chapter)
- Methods: extreme-value and multivariate statistics, downscaling and bias correction, hydrologic and hydrodynamic modelling, machine learning, uncertainty analysis
How we work
Small by design
Jykan Water takes on a limited number of projects at a time so that the principal does the work rather than supervising it. For larger scopes we partner with prime consultants, and any associates are engaged under their own agreements with the firm.
Methods you can trace
Every number we produce can be traced to a dataset, a method and an evaluation step, all written down. Where the science is uncertain we say so and quantify it. Where a question cannot be answered defensibly with the data available, we say that too.
We are registered on CanadaBuys, the Ontario Tenders Portal, MERX and bids&tenders. Procurement details.
Talk to the person who will do the work
There is no sales team. Your first conversation is with the engineer who would lead the project.