Vijay K. Gupta began his career in hydrology in 1968. He widely published in major research journals in hydrologic and atmospheric sciences, applied mathematics, probability theory, and nonlinear processes in geophysics.

He was invited as a keynote speaker in several national and international conferences and workshops, and gave seminars at well-known universities in USA, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Vijay's life-long collaboration with colleagues from many different disciplines and outstanding graduate students led to establishing the nonlinear geophysical foundations of floods in river networks on multiple space and time scales. The Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa is building on these foundations with new applications. He modernized and developed a new graduate course over a decade titled “introduction to multi-scale hydrology”, which has continued to be taught at the University of Iowa.