Debra Perrone

Debra Perrone is a postdoctoral research fellow with a dual appointment in the Woods Institute's Water in the West Program and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. Debra is interested in the multifaceted, interrelationship between water, energy, and food resources. Her work explores how the interactions among these resources affect decisions and tradeoffs involved in water resource management. At Stanford, she is part of an interdisciplinary team that is developing a Western Water Dashboard. Debra and her colleagues are mining, compiling, and analyzing environmental, economic, and socio-political data to identify factors that influence water use. The objective of this work is to create helpful and useful visualizations for water-use stakeholders.

Debra received her undergraduate degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Lafayette College in 2008. An active member of Lafayettes Engineers Without Borders chapter, she worked on water projects in rural Honduras. After graduation she began the PhD Program in Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University and became a fellow of Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment. In 2011, she was awarded an Environmental Protection Agency STAR fellowship for her research on the water-energy-food nexus. In Summer 2012, she participated in the Young Summer Scientist Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and a year later she was granted a NSF's East Asia Pacific Summer Institute fellowship in Singapore. Debra graduated in May 2014 and was the Graduate Schools Founders Medalist for First Hono