Vulnerability and Climate Change Working Group
Molly Lipscomb
Molly Lipscomb is an associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy and the Director of the Center for Social Innovation at the University of Virginia’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Lipscomb is an environmental and development economist. She has worked on water issues in developing economies and infrastructure development for over 15 years, and used remote sensing data in several projects. She focuses primarily on access to infrastructure services. She has performed large-scale evaluations of the impact of electricity access and water quality in Brazil and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Julianne Quinn
Julianne Quinn is an Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on developing simulation and optimization methods to improve the management of water resources systems for conflicting objectives under uncertainty. She has experience designing multi-purpose, multi-reservoir operations in the Red River Basin of Vietnam. She also has expertise in climate risk and vulnerability analyses, and in the design of robust and adaptive water management strategies to reduce these risks.
Jay Shimshack
Jay Shimshack is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Virginia’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He specializes in environmental and health economics. Much of his research addresses disaster preparedness, risk communication, and environmental policy implementation. Shimshack has worked with both traditional and remote sensing data to understand the causes and consequences of environmental disparities, the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of environmental policy, and heterogeneity in disaster preparation and response to environmental risk. He has 20 years of experience building and supporting research-practitioner partnerships between academics and government agencies. He is trained in, and has published on, non-market valuation techniques.
Ryan Smith
Ryan Smith is an Assistant Professor of Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. He is a remote sensing hydrologist that specializes in using process-based and machine learning models to study groundwater systems with satellite datasets, including interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), as well as thermal, optical and gravity datasets. His work is funded by NASA, the USGS, the NGA, and the NIH. His work also seeks to better understand how climate and land use can impact the sustainability of groundwater resources.
Brendan Novak
Brendan Novak is the Associate Director of the Center for Social Innovation at the University of Virginia’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is a data management expert with an MPP in public policy. He has experience aiding in the evaluation of policy at the state and federal level, and has experience working in Stata, QGIS, Python, and R.
Venkataraman Lakshmi
Venkataraman Lakshmi is a Professor of Engineering Systems and the Environment at the University of Virginia. He has worked on water resources problems combining hydrological modeling and satellite remote sensing for over 30 years. He recently completed a Group of Earth Observations (GEO) project supported by NASA Applied Sciences (Water Resources) on use of modeling and remote sensing (Ganga River Basin) and capacity building (Cauvery River Basin) working with the Ministry of Water, Government of Karnataka (2017-2020). His areas of expertise range from retrieval of hydrological variables from satellite and aircraft sensors, downscaling of soil moisture, hydrological modeling of large river basins using in-situ and satellite data sets for modeling soil moisture, evapotranspiration and streamflow and use of artificial intelligence/machine learning for determining connections between terrestrial and atmospheric variables to characterize continental hydrology. He has investigated the phenomena of droughts, floods, landslides, and permafrost occurrence using models and satellite observations.
Denis Nekipelov
Denis Nekipelov is an Associate Professor of Economics and Computer Science (by courtesy) at the University of Virginia and an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Inc. His work integrates Econometric methods with methods from Statistical Learning Theory and Machine learning to build approaches for causal inference and analysis in environments with interacting agents. His work has informed some real-world analytic tools and methods that have been implemented at scale at companies like Microsoft, Zillow and Booking.com.
Thomas Piechota
Thomas Piechota is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Chapman University. He has worked on issues related to climate impacts on water resources and drought for over 25 years. This includes streamflow forecasting studies in the southwest U.S. with support from NSF, USGS and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In 2006, he spent a sabbatical with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Lower Colorado River Office and assisted with mitigation plans for Lower Colorado River water shortages. In addition, he has presented on various climate and water issues in Egypt as part of the U.S. State Department, International Programs in 2010. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Adam Storeygard
Adam is an Associate Professor of Economics at Tufts University. He is an urban and development economist with methodological expertise in remote sensing and other geographic data, and substantive focuses in transport and climate. He has worked with remote sensing and other physical geographic data in a social science context for 20 years. Some of this work has been specifically on socioeconomic effects of climate change in India and Africa. He has presented on satellite data to the President of the World Bank, has served as a member of the User Working Group of NASA's Socioeconomic and Data Applications Center, and is currently a Research Associate of the National Bureau for Economic Research.
John Bolten
John is serving as the Chief of the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Associate Program Manager of Water Resources for the NASA Applied Sciences Program and is leading NASA's International Water Strategy. His research focuses on the application of satellite-based remote sensing and land surface hydrological modeling for improved ecological and water resource management. His most recent work includes the development of an improved hydrological decision support system for the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center and Mekong River Commission, development of the operational global soil moisture product for the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service crop forecasting system, and a deep learning-based system for improved satellite-based agricultural monitoring products.