Cooma resident James Pirozzi has been named Engineering Student of the Year by Engineers Australia. Mr Pirozzi, who works as an engineer for Snowy Hydro Limited was out of the country for work when the award was announced.

He completed his Bachelor Engineering (Civil) degree with First Class Honours from School of Engineering, University of Western Sydney in 2008. His overall grade point average of the course was 5.97/7. Mr Pirozzi obtained 90 per cent in his final year thesis. He also received seven high distinctions and 11 distinctions in his Bachelor Engineering (Civil) course.

His thesis title was “Regional Design Streamflow Estimation for Eastern NSW”. This thesis was carried out under the supervision of Dr Ataur Rahman as a part of the on-going research work in

relation to the upcoming revision of

Australian Rainfall and Runoff.

Mr Pirozzi produced an excellent thesis containing 252 pages. He has written a refereed paper based on his thesis for the National Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium of 2009 and was preparing another journal paper. Mr Pirozzi also received the Australian Water Association NSW branch best undergraduate thesis award in 2009.

In his thesis, James upgraded the Probabilistic Rational Method for design flood estimation for small to medium sized ungauged catchments for Eastern NSW using the latest streamflow and catchment information from 56 catchments. The method was last upgraded in 1987. He has also developed an alternative method based on quantile regression technique, which is simple, statistically sound, and easier to apply than the Probabilistic Rational Method. Mr Pirozzi’s results will be useful in preparing the fourth edition of Australian Rainfall and Runoff for which Federal Department of Climate Change has granted $2 million.