Hailing from a ski resort in the Swiss alps, I went into engineering with the dream of manufacturing (real) diamonds to pay for my snowboarding passion. It took one trip to Southeast Asia to make me realize that the world has bigger problems, and that engineers can do something about them. I became passionate about water issues in the Global South. After a civil engineering license in Switzerland (MSc. EPFL) and several research trips on the field (Cambodia and Tanzania), where I was mostly interested in water quality issues (particularly arsenic), I moved to California as a Fulbright Scholar pursue multi-disciplinarity and change the world.

I did my PhD at the University of California Berkeley, where I was interested in streamflow prediction and rural electrification in Nepal, and a postdoc a Stanford University, where I focused on remote sensing and transboundary water issues in the Middle East. I also had the honor of teaching undergraduate maths at Prison University Project, a degree-granting university program within the walls of St-Quentin State Prison (CA).

I spent several years on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame where I obtained tenure in 2023. I have recently returned to Switzerland, where I now serve as a group leader in Principal Investigator at Eawag -- the Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology -- in the Systems Analysis and Integrated Modeling department. I also serve as Associate Research Professor in Water Security and Conflicts at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWH), the water focused think tank of the UN, and teach Water and International Security at the University of St Gallen. 

While a hydrologist and water engineer at core, I am fascinated by creative ways to model human behavior (what economists do), and by transformative technologies to extract and disseminate knowledge from data (what computer scientists do). My passion as a researcher is to integrate insights from these fields in a useful way to promote equitable and sustainable global access to safe water and energy.

Current Members

Past Members

Postdocs:

• Dr Leonardo Bertassello Next position: research scientist at the European Commission Joint Research Center

• Dr Fengwei Hung Next position: postdoc at University of Notre Dame

• Dr Kevin Roche Next Position: Assistant Professor at Boise State University

• Dr Gopal Penny Next Position: Assistant Professor at National University of Singapore

Graduate Students (University of Notre Dame)

• Dr Patrick Cho Next Position: Catastrophe Model Analyst at Arrowhead Programs/Brown and Brown

• Dr Lauren McGiven

• Dr Connor Mullen: Next Position: high school and AP instructor at Seabury Hall, Maui (HI)

• Amy Kryston Next Position: MPH student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Undergraduate Students, interns and  Zivis

• Josh Anderegg, Computer Science, ETH Zürich

• Nour El Ajou, Climate science, Univ of Bern

• Katie Sullivan, Environmental Engineering and  Kellogg International Scholar Program

• Kelsey Kennedy, Chemical Engineering and Kellogg International Scholar Program

• Talia Harb, Civil Engineering and Kellogg International Scholar Program

• Adam Wiechman, Dual Environmental Engineering and Political Science (Currently a PhD student at Arizona State University)

• Marisa Ross, Environmental Engineering

• Dunyeng Huh, Applied Computational Mathematics and Statistics

• Noah Junge, Environmental Engineering

• Claire Nauman, Environmental Engineering