Biography
Jay Famiglietti is a professor, a hydrologist and a climate science communicator. He was born James Stephen Famiglietti, in Providence, RI. His father, Alfonse, was a mechanical engineer, and his mother, Dorothy, a bookkeeper. He was raised in Cranston, RI where he graduated from Cranston High School West. He has one older sibling, a brother, Bruce, who still resides in the state.
Famiglietti attended Tufts University in Medford, MA, where he majored in Geology. His love of the outdoors led to a life-long commitment to the environment and to graduate degrees in hydrology from the University of Arizona and Princeton University. At Princeton he married Catherine Keane.
His academic career progressed through faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California, Irvine, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Saskatchewan, and Arizona State University.
Jay's career as a featured expert in film and television documentaries, and in news magazine programs, blossomed after his appearance in Participant Media's Last Call at the Oasis (2011). Reviewers noted his engaging manner (New York Times) and lauded his 'droll deadpan'(San Francisco International Film Festival) and his 'delightfully glum' (Variety) delivery. His onscreen quip "we're screwed," while lamenting the fate of California water resources, became one of the movie's key tag lines. Following a number of high-profile research papers and op-eds on the depletion of the world's groundwater resources, Famiglietti has since appeared on CBS 60 Minutes (2010) and on Real Time with Bill Maher (2003), in the PBS water documentary series H2O: The Molecule that Made Us, in Amazon Prime's Day Zero, and in DW Documentary's Thirst series.
In 2019, Jay created the freshwater science podcast What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti, and served as its Executive Producer and host for 71 episodes over 5 seasons.
