Tissa Illangasekare is the AMAX Distinguished Chair and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and the founding Director of Center for Experimental Study of Subsurface Environmental Processes (CESEP.mines.edu). He is a Fellow of American Geophysical Union (AGU), Fellow of American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Fellow of Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) and a Fellow of the Academy of Science of Sri Lanka. He has a PhD in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University and an Honorary Doctorate from Uppsala University.  He the recipient of 2012 Darcy Medal from European Geosciences Union (EGU), the 2015 recipient of the AGU’s Langbein Lecture Award (a Bowie lecture) given in recognition of lifetime contributions to the science of hydrology. He was the past editor of Water Resources Research, the past editor of Earth Science Review and the past co-editor of Vadose Zone Journal. He was the recipient of the 2016 PSIPW International Groundwater Prize awarded by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the UN in New York. Appointed by President Obama in 2017 he is currently serving as a member of the Nuclear Waste Technology Study Board (NWTRB).  Currently he is an editor of AGU's Advances, AGU's Perspectives in Earth and Planetary Sciences, and the Specialty Chief Editor of a newly launched journal of Water and Human Health of Frontiers.

His research experience and expertise are in numerical modeling of flow and transport in porous and fractured media, unsaturated and saturated zone processes, snow hydrology, land-atmospheric interaction, multiphase flow, carbon storage, aquifer remediation, physical modeling of flow and transport and sensor technologies for environmental applications.