Jenny Skerker
TomKat Graduate Fellow for Translational Research
Research Lab: Sarah Fletcher
Year Awarded: 2023
Jenny is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a member of the Fletcher Lab. Her research focuses on incorporating principles of equity and environmental justice into water resources computational decision-support tools, as well as on understanding how to adapt current water systems to climate change and future uncertainties. Before coming to Stanford, Jenny was a water resources engineer where she worked on a range of stormwater, site remediation, and bridge development projects. Jenny received her undergraduate degree in environmental engineering from Tufts University. Jenny is currently a co-lead for Engineering Students for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, where she also runs a volunteering program with College Track in East Palo Alto. She is also a co-lead for the Environmental Engineering Student Committee. In her free time she enjoys running - completing her third marathon in December 2022 - exploring the Bay Area and spending time with friends and family.
Decision-Support Innovation for Affordable and Sustainable Water Supply Planning
Water affordability is a growing problem as aging infrastructure and climate change uncertainty lead to rising water prices. When water is expensive, low-income communities are disproportionately harmed, as they may have to choose between which essential expenditures to pay or what water-related needs to forego. Furthermore, climate change and shifting hydrologic patterns make providing consistent water access an increasingly costly and complex resource utilization problem, challenging sustainability efforts. Currently, decision-support tools focus on minimizing total utility-level costs, ignoring distributional household-level impacts, which they cannot even measure. The goal of this work is to develop a decision-support tool that explicitly operationalizes household affordability to inform how long-term infrastructure investments and short-term policy measures can be coordinated to maximize affordability and sustainability under long-term climate change.