Durga Lal Shrestha graduated in civil engineering in 1996 from Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal. He then joined to Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM), a government organization under Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology to work as a hydrologist engineer in November 1996. The major work task included hydrological data analysis and processing, hydrological database management, hydrometric stations monitoring. Before joining to government job he had worked for half a year in private consulting form as civil engineer and carried out design and estimation of rural water supply system in one of the district in far western region of Nepal and structural design and estimation of half a dozen building structures.

In October 2000 he came to UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft, Netherlands to participate in master's program in Hydroinformatics. He was awarded Master of Science degree with distinction in Hydroinformatics in April 2002. His title of thesis was Application of Bayesian Networks in Hydroinformatics. In his thesis he showed applicability of Bayesian networks in two distinct fields i.e. assessment of the risk of structural collapse of the sewer using static networks and rainfall-runoff modeling using dynamic networks. After finishing Master of Science degree, he continued as research student in Hydroinformatics under guidance of Dr. Dimitri P. Solomatine in the fields of computational intelligence methods in hydrological modeling.

In March 2004 he enrolled as a PhD research fellow at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Hydroinformatics with main research areas being the application of computational intelligence in uncertainty modeling and flood forecasting. The research involves flood forecasting and uncertainty modeling using computational intelligence methods such as artificial neural networks, decision and model trees, fuzzy logic, support vector machines, non-linear dynamic and chaos theory, committee machines, and including novel and innovative approaches of computational intelligence methods such as committee machines, hybrid modeling, and composite model construction approaches.

Mr. Shrestha is a member of International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), International Association of Hydraulic Research, IAHR, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, IEEE. He is also member of national organization: the Nepal Engineer's Association, NEA and the Nepal Engineer Council, NEC.