April 2, 2026
Category: News
Montgomery & Associates (M&A) is proud to continue its sponsorship of the Montgomery Prize, recognizing excellence in hydrology and geosciences at the University of Arizona. Two students were awarded this prize at the annual El Día del Agua y la Atmósfera, and one winner was selected at GeoDaze.
The winner of the $2,000 Montgomery Prize for best presentation in hydrology at El Dia is Ben West. His presentation is titled “Using Integrated Hydrologic Modeling to Investigate the Spatiotemporal Characteristics of Droughts in Catchments with Human Water Management.” Ben is a UA graduate student pursuing an M.S. in Hydrology.
The winner of M&A’s $500 second prize for oral presentation in hydrology at the El Dia event is Hossein Yousefi. His presentation is titled “Quantifying the Domain Gap in Multivariate Diffusion Downscaling: Real-to-Real versus Synthetic-to-Real Training Across Two Downscaling Scales.” Hossein is a UA graduate student who earned an M.S. in Civil Engineering and Hydrology and Water Resources from the University of Tehran and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from K.N. Toosi University of Technology in Iran.
Erika Gallo, Ph.D., M&A Career Development Lead, and Victoria Hermosilla, P.G., M&A Hydrogeologist, presented the awards along with Peter Troch, UA Hydrogeology & Atmospheric Sciences Professor and Department Head.
Guy Wall, a hydrogeologist in M&A’s Reno office and current graduate student at UA, presented a poster at this year’s El Dia conference.
This year’s winner of the $2,500 Montgomery Prize for best overall talk at GeoDaze is Tomás Guerreiro for his presentation, “Reactive Crystallization Driving Ultramafic To Mafic Differentiation In The Deep Crust: Insights From Las Juntas Complex, Famatinian Arc, Argentina.” Tomás is a Geosciences graduate student who earned his bachelor’s degree in Geology from the Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, Argentina and pursued doctoral studies at CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina).
Erika Gallo presented the award to Tomás.
The El Día and GeoDaze events are held every March during EarthWeek and organized by students from the UA Hydrology & Atmospheric Sciences Department and Geosciences Department, respectively.
M&A is a longtime sponsor of El Día and GeoDaze, celebrating the important contributions students make to the fields of hydrology and geology.
For more information about M&A or our efforts to give back to our communities, please visit our website.
Ben West receives the Montgomery Prize for best overall presentation at El Dia
Hossein Yousefi receives second place Montgomery Prize at El Dia
Guy Wall, M&A employee and UA grad student presents research poster at El Dia
Tomas Guerreiro is presented with the Montgomery Prize at GeoDaze
