Kim Quesnel

Kim Quesnel is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department as part of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Reinventing the Nation's Urban Water Infrastructure (ReNUWIt) and Stanford's Water in the West program. In Kim's research, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to investigating urban water demand as a key component of advancing future supply planning. As part of this work, she examined how media coverage and coupled public awareness of the recent historic California drought were related to changes in water use behavior. She is also using high resolution data from smart water meters to model water use at the customer level, gaining insights that can be used for forecasting future needs. Additionally, motivated by the water sector's chronic fiscal challenges, Kim is researching novel approaches to water financing and governance that can help to increase innovation in the water sector.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Kim worked as a civil engineer in Denver, Colorado in the field of environmental remediation, responsible for both technical design work and project management. She has also worked on a wide range of water-related research projects including the laboratory investigation of tsunami wave breaking behaviors at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory in Oregon, the assessment and design of water filtration systems in rural Thailand, and the study of glacier hydrology through field research in Alaska. Kim received a B.S. in Civil Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and an M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology from Stanford. She was awarded an Environmental Protection Agency STAR fellowship for her research on urban water demand, and her work has been featured by the L.A. Times, Scientific American, Grist, and High Country News.