People

Management Team

Jan Kwakkel, President (Delft University of Technology)

Jan Kwakkel is an associate professor at Delft University of Technology. His research focusses on model-based support for decision making under deep uncertainty. He is the lead developer of the exploratory modelling workbench, an open source toolkit for scenario discovery and related deep uncertainty techniques. He has applied his work in various domains, including climate and water, and transport. He is a member of the editorial board of Environmental Modelling & Software, and Futures and Foresight Science. https://www.tudelft.nl/tbm/over-de-faculteit/afdelingen/multi-actor-systems/people/associate-professors/drir-jh-jan-kwakkel/

Nidhi Kalra, Vice-President (RAND Corporation)

Nidhi Kalra is a senior information scientist at the RAND Corporation. She has previously served as director of RAND’s San Francisco Bay Area office and co-director of RAND’s Center for Decision Making Under Uncertainty. Her research focuses on autonomous vehicle policy, climate change adaptation, and tools and methods that help people and organizations make better decisions amid deep uncertainty. In 2018, Kalra served as senior technology policy adviser to U.S. Senator Kamala D. Harris. In 2013, she served as a senior decision scientist in the Office of the Chief Economist of Sustainable Development at the World Bank, where she helped launch the World Bank’s portfolio in robust decision making. Kalra holds a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

Education and Training

Edmundo Molina-Perez, Education and Training Chair (Tecnológico de Monterrey)
Edmundo Molina-Perez is an assistant research professor at the School of Government and Public Transformation of Tecnológico de Monterrey. His work focuses on the development of new computational methods for studying technological change, and the use of data science methods for decision analysis under conditions of deep uncertainty.

Career Development

Julie Rozenberg, Career Development Chair (World Bank)
Julie Rozenberg is a Senior Economist at the World Bank. She focuses on decision making support for infrastructure, green growth and climate change mitigation strategies, and climate change adaptation and disaster risk management. She tailors DMDU methods to economics and development problems and applies them to World Bank client countries’ projects and development strategies.

Membership

Sadie McEvoy, Membership Chair (Deltares)
Sadie McEvoy is a researcher at Deltares, in the Netherlands. She specializes in climate adaptation and adaptive planning, including stakeholder involvement in decision making processes and planning in developing contexts. Sadie’s interests lie in applying DMDU methods in collaborative planning settings and in integrating spatial implications of uncertainty into DMDU methods and their applications. She is a Chapter Scientist and contributing author for the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II.

Fundraising

Steven Popper, Fundraising Chair (RAND Corporation)
Steven Popper is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. As associate director of the RAND Science and Technology Policy Institute (1996–2001), Popper provided research and analytic support to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other agencies of the Executive Branch. 

Rules and processes

Taylor Winchell, Rules and Processes Chair (Denver Water)
Taylor Winchell works in the climate change adaptation and water supply planning programs at Denver Water, where he focuses on translating climate change threats to on-the-ground adaptation efforts. Taylor additionally has experience in the environmental non-profit sector and working on international development projects focused on climate change adaptation. He received his MS in water resource engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his BS in environmental engineering science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Communications and Outreach

Antonia Hadjimichael, Communications and Outreach Chair (Cornell University)

Antonia Hadjimichael is a postdoctoral associate of the Reed Group at Cornell University. She obtained a Bachelors in Mathematics from the University of Leicester and a Masters in Environmental Modeling from University College London (UCL), in the UK. Her doctoral work at the University of Girona, Spain, focused on the development of decision-support tools for urban wastewater systems. At her current position she focusses on decision making for complex systems under deep uncertainty, particularly focusing on water resources systems, as well as on understanding their water interactions with other sectors.

Javed Ali, DMDU Communications Support (University of Central Florida)

Javed Ali is a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Central Florida. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Engineering from G.B. Pant University of Agriculture & Technology (India), a Master’s degree in Water Science & Engineering (specialization in Flood Risk Management) from UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education (The Netherlands) and another Master’s degree in Hydro Science & Engineering from TU Dresden (Germany). Currently, he’s been working on a NAS funded project “The New First Line of Defense: Building Community Resilience through Residential Risk Disclosure” for studying the multi-hazards risk including their possible spatial and temporal interactions and dynamic vulnerability and exposure.