Scientific Steering Group

Nathalie Voisin, Co-Chair
Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL)

Dr. Voisin’s research focuses on better understanding and predicting the inter-dependencies between land-water systems’ resilience and power systems’ resilience toward identifying vulnerabilities and opportunities in joint operations and planning under compounded short and long term stressors (climate extremes, water availability, market fluctuations, technology innovations, etc). Approaches include improving the representation of hydro-climate constraints and opportunities in power system models, improving the prediction of climate-water-land processes leading to critical sensitivities in power system models, and coupling climate, hydrology and water resources management models with power system models across spatial and temporal scales.
Website: https://hydrology.pnnl.gov/staff/staff_info.asp?staff_num=2203

Klaus Keller, Co-Chair
Dartmouth College

Dr. Keller’s research addresses two interrelated questions. First, how can we mechanistically understand past and potentially predict future changes in the Earth system? Second, how can we use this information to design sustainable, scientifically sound, technologically feasible, economically efficient, and ethically defensible risk management strategies? He analyzes these questions by mission-oriented basic research covering a wide range of disciplines such as Earth system science, economics, engineering, philosophy, decision science, and statistics. 
Website: https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/community/faculty/klaus-keller

Jennifer Morris, Core Member
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Dr. Morris’ research focuses on uncertainty analysis, energy-economic modeling and coupled human-natural systems. Her uncertainty-related work involves uncertainty quantification, risk assessment and applying different approaches to represent uncertainties in models and explore how they impact near-term decisions. A key focus is investment planning for energy, water and coastal adaptation. Using multi-region, multi-sector human system modeling frameworks, she also develops integrated economic and climate scenarios, examines regional and sectoral dynamics, explores energy transitions and economic development pathways, and investigates avenues for incorporating climate impacts into human system models.
Website: https://globalchange.mit.edu/about-us/personnel/morris-jennifer

Casey Burleyson, Core Member
Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL)

Dr. Casey Burleyson is a research scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. A meteorologist by training, Casey currently works on a broad range of topics ranging from understanding the factors that control cloud formation and organization to simulating climate and population impacts on regional building energy demand. He is an advocate for the emerging trend of open data and software in the scientific community. Casey has contributed to the adoption of an open data repository for PNNL and is leading the development of a collaborative data platform for the MultiSector Dynamics community within DOE.
Website: https://www.pnnl.gov/science/staff/staff_info.asp?staff_num=8073

Andy Jones, Core Member
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)

Dr. Jones is a Staff Scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he leads the Earth Systems and Society Program Domain. His research uses quantitative Earth system science tools –computer models, uncertainty quantification techniques, etc. – to gain decision-relevant insight into how humans affect the climate and vice versa. Major themes include the “usability” of regional climate projections for adaptation planning, the resilience of energy, water, and food systems to multiple stressors, the role of land use change in efforts to both reduce and adapt to climate change, and the tightly coupled interactions among people, built infrastructure, and environmental processes in urban contexts.
Website: https://eesa.lbl.gov/profiles/andrew-d-jones/

Nicole Jackson, Core Member
Sandia National Laboratory

Dr. Nicole D. Jackson is a technical staff member in Sandia National Laboratories’ Climate Change Security Center.   Her expertise centers on using climate and weather data to quantify exposure and impacts from extreme weather on critical infrastructure performance and resilience. Nicole’s current research portfolio includes projects across multiple spatial and temporal scales with a focus on solar, hydropower, and the grid at large.

Rebecca Saari, Core Member
University of Waterloo

Dr. Rebecca K. Saari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Saari studies the consequences of climate change and climate policy on human health and environmental inequality. Dr. Saari has employed economic models, emissions models, atmospheric chemical transport models, and health response models to assess the costs and co-benefits of climate policy, energy policy, and transportation policy.
Website: https://uwaterloo.ca/scholar/rsaari

David McCollum, Working Group representative
Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL)

Dr. David L. McCollum is a Senior R&D Staff in the Mobility and Energy Transitions Analysis (META) Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with expertise spanning economics, engineering, policy analysis, and corporate advisory services. His research attempts to inform state, national (developed and developing) and global energy and environmental issues on matters related to, among others, deep decarbonization, net-zero emissions pathways, energy-transport-climate policies, electric sector planning, end-use sector electrification (transport, buildings, industry), Sustainable Development Goals (including inter-dependencies), financing needs for the energy system transformation, and human dimensions of climate change. He employs energy-economic systems and integrated assessment models in support of this work.
Website: https://www.ornl.gov/staff-profile/david-l-mccollum

Jim Yoon, Working Group representative
Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL)

Dr. Yoon’s research focuses on the development and application of advanced modeling and simulation techniques to understand and evaluate coupled human-natural systems, identifying solutions that can enhance system sustainability, equity, and resilience under changing climate and socioeconomic conditions. He has a particular interest in utilizing agent-based models to represent human adaptation, ranging broadly from individual consumer choices to institutional change, in integrated water system models. 
Website: https://energyenvironment.pnnl.gov/staff/staff_info.asp?staff_num=3295

Christa Brelsford, Working Group representative
Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL)

Dr. Brelsford is a Research Scientist in the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her research uses data science tools from economics, geography, network science and spatial statistics to describe the co-evolutionary processes between human systems and the built and natural environment. These analyses have been particularly focused on urban contexts; exploring themes of urban water management, infrastructure provisioning and resilience, and human behavioral responses to surprising events.

Website: https://www.ornl.gov/staff-profile/christa-m-brelsford

Julia Szinai Working Group representative
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Dr. Szinai is a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research is focused on climate change adaptation of the electricity and water sectors in the Western United States, and she also is interested in how various distributed energy resources (energy efficiency, demand response and smart charging electric vehicles) can facilitate integration of renewable resources and decarbonization of the electricity grid.

Website:  https://eesa.lbl.gov/profiles/julia-szinai/

Vivek Srikrishnan, Working Group representative
Cornell University

Vivek Srikrishnan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological & Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. He works on climate risk management, at the interface of systems engineering, climate dynamics, economics, data science, and decision science. Dr. Srikrishnan received an M.S. and Ph.D in Energy & Mineral Engineering from Penn State and a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Website: https://viveks.bee.cornell.edu/

Wei Peng, Working Group representative
Penn State University

Wei Peng is an assistant professor of international affairs and civil and environmental engineering, SIA’s first joint appointment faculty member with the College of Engineering. Peng’s research focuses on the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of energy policies in both emerging markets and advanced economies using a variety of modeling methods.
Website: https://www.sia.psu.edu/people/individual/wei-peng

Facilitation Team

Patrick Reed
Cornell University

Dr. Reed’s research bridges sustainability science, risk management, operations research, and artificial intelligence. His Decision Analytics in Complex Systems research group is exploring new frameworks for effectively combining a wide range of knowledge sources with simulation, optimization, and information technologies to capture impacted systems’ governing processes, elucidate human and ecologic risks, limit management costs, and satisfy conflicting performance objectives. The software tools developed by Dr. Reed combine multiobjective optimization, high performance computing, and advanced spatiotemporal visualization and uncertainty modeling techniques.
Website: http://reed.cee.cornell.edu

Antonia Hadjimichael
Penn State

Dr. Hadjimichael’s research applies exploratory modeling, diagnostics, and multi-objective evolutionary optimization to inform planning for water resources systems under uncertainty. She is also interested in advancing model- and simulation-based decision analytics to improve our understanding of system interactions and dynamics.
Website: https://www.hadjimichael.info/

Erwan Monier
University of California, Davis

Dr. Monier’s research explores the climate change and extreme weather impacts to various sectors of the economy and ecosystem services, including agriculture, terrestrial ecosystem health and wildfires. His Global Environmental Change research group applies interdisciplinary approaches to examine the co-evolution of human and natural systems in the face of global environmental change and to build the next generation of tools to explore the dynamics of the energy-water-land system and the interactions among climate, air quality and health.
Website: https://monier.faculty.ucdavis.edu

Chris Vernon
Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL)

Chris Vernon is a senior data scientist as Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Chris specializes in all things geospatial and is a noisy proponent of open-source software and reproducibility within integrated science. Chris is engrained in MSD research as the lead software engineer for the Integrated Multisector Multiscale Modeling (IM3) project and the Enabling and Foundational Capabilities task lead for the Global Change Intersectoral Modeling System (GCIMS) project.
Website: https://energyenvironment.pnnl.gov/staff/staff_info.asp?staff_num=1834

David Gold
Cornell University

David Gold is a PhD student in the Reed Group at Cornell University. His research focuses on multi-actor water supply planning problems under deeply uncertain conditions. His work uses exploratory modeling tools and multi-objective optimization to explore the drivers of regional conflict and discover new strategies for compromise. When not working on research, David likes to play the banjo, be outside and hang out with his dog.
Website: https://reed.cee.cornell.edu/current_members/

Andrew Hamilton
Cornell University

Dr. Hamilton is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Reed Group in Cornell University’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research explores strategies for managing drought-related risks in water resource, energy, and agricultural systems. This work combines coupled simulation models of natural, engineered, and institutional systems with computational decision support tools such as multi-objective optimization, global sensitivity analysis, and visualization.
Website: https://www.andrewlhamilton.com/

Rohini Gupta
Cornell University

Rohini Gupta is a PhD student in the Reed Research Group at Cornell University where she is focused on creating paleo-informed future weather scenarios to better assess the robustness of California food, energy, and water systems to a changing climate. In her free time, she enjoys being outdoors, playing music with her friends, running, and stargazing.
Website: https://reed.cee.cornell.edu/current_members/

Sequoia Alba
University of California, Davis

Sequoia Alba is Ph.D. student in the Atmospheric Science Graduate Group in the Global Environmental Change Lab at UC Davis. Her research focuses on remote sensing data assimilation and wildfire prediction. Additionally, she is very interested in how scientific inquiry can be used to inform policy decisions, particularly how scientists, policy makers, and government organizations can work together to benefit society.
Website: https://globalchange.ucdavis.edu/people/sequoia-alba

Richard Moss
Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL)

Dr. Moss’ research focuses on the role of human agency and decision making in the co-evolution of coupled human-natural systems and factors that facilitate or limit interdisciplinary scientific collaboration. Current projects include evaluation of scientific information to support coastal disaster recovery planning, work he is conducting while on a leave of absence from PNNL at the Andlinger Center at Princeton University. In addition to his academic work, Richard has held a number of public service positions in government and non-governmental organizations.
Website: https://www.pnnl.gov/science/staff/staff_info.asp?staff_num=5688