Sayan Dey, a PhD student in hydraulics and hydrology, has been selected as Purdue's 2018 Esri Development Center (EDC) Student of the Year for his work on "Watershed scale River Channel Morphology Model: An ArcMap tool for automated generation of river channel geometry." The contest is sponsored by Purdue Libraries, and the winner also receives an invitation to be internationally recognized at the annual Esri Developer Summit.

Sayan's work deals with topography, which plays an important role in flood modeling of riverine systems. However, most topographic datasets lack accurate information about the river channel geometry (also known as bathymetry). Sayan created an automated toolbar in ArcGIS, called the Watershed-scale River Channel Morphology Model (W-RCMM) that provides 3D representation of river networks for large watersheds. This leads to significant improvement in hydrodynamic models.

Sayan is advised by Dr. Venkatesh Merwade.