Trevor Amestoy
Ph.D. Student
Trevor completed his B.S. in Civil Engineering at the University of New Mexico in 2021 with a focus on Water Resource Engineering. Prior to joining the Reed Group, Trevor gained experience at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility and UNM’s Center for Water and Environment.
Trevor received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in Spring 2021 and joined the Reed Research Group in Fall 2021. Trevor’s research focuses on advancing integrated water availability assessment modeling frameworks. This involves studying reservoir operations, natural hydrologic variability, drought patterns, and the impacts of water policy on basin-wide management goals.
In his free time, he likes to go trail running, read sci-fi, and make art using code.
Email: tja73@cornell.edu
Website: trevoramestoy.com
Resume (PDF)
Rohini Gupta
Ph.D. Student
Rohini completed her B.S. in CEE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017, with a focus in hydrology and energy-water-environment sustainability. She received her M.S. in CEE at Cornell in 2019 as a member of Reed Research Group where she focused on understanding how evolutionary algorithms can be used to discover optimal financial risk management strategies for hydropower utilities in California. Rohini is currently pursuing her PhD in the group with a focus on creating paleo-informed future weather scenarios to better assess the robustness of California food, energy, and water systems to a changing climate. In her free time, she enjoys being outdoors, playing music with her friends, running, and stargazing.
Email: rg727@cornell.edu
CV (PDF)
Lillian LauPh.D. Student
Lillian is a second-year PhD student in focusing on Environmental and Water Resources Systems. She graduated with a B.S. in CEE from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Spring 2020. She received her M.S. in CEE at Cornell in 2022 for her work on studying the implications of imperfect water portfolio policy implementation on short-term management goals and long-term infrastructure investment pathways. For her PhD, she is working towards improving the transparency and explainability of advanced decision making methods in water systems management and planning. She is interested in how the complex dynamics that arise from the interactions between risks, stakeholder action, and deeply uncertain climate and socioeconomic factors drive changes in infrastructure pathways. When not working, she can be found attempting yoga, salsa, and cross-stitching.
Email: lbl59@cornell.edu
CV (PDF)
Michael Luo
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Michael Luo is an undergraduate student majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. He is interested in using operations research methods and algorithms to optimize real-world, particularly environmental, decision-making problems. Michael is involved in CU GeoData, conducting predictive modeling for harmful algal blooms in Cayuga Lake. He has also represented Cornell in the international mathematical contest in modeling. In his free time, Michael enjoys listening to audiobooks and cooking.
Email: yl989@cornell.edu
Marilyn Smith
PhD Student
Marilyn obtained her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma in 2021 and her M.S. in Environmental Engineering at Syracuse University in 2023. Marilyn’s master’s thesis research focused on analyzing the frequency of pipeline failures after natural disasters and analyzing how the frequency of those failures would change over time and the areas that will be most susceptible to those failures. Other research projects Marilyn has collaborated on includes looking into effective science communication practices for how biodiversity changes in the Wadden Sea are directly effecting people and conducting environmental monitoring assessments at Argonne National Laboratory for the Decision and Infrastructure Sciences department. Marilyn has recently joined the Reed Research Group in Fall 2023. Outside of research, Marilyn enjoys spending time with her friends and family and trying new restaurants!
Email: ms3654@cornell.edu
LinkedIn: Marilyn Smith
Resume
Sai Veena Sunkara
Postdoctoral Associate
Sai Veena is currently a postdoctoral associate in Reed group since February 2024. She earned her PhD in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and holds a Bachelor of Technology in Civil Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani. Sai Veena’s Ph.D. thesis focused on advancing research on large scale water projects by inclusion of cooperative information exchange, multi-faceted robustness analysis, and stakeholder elicited information in decision analysis and model building. The thesis highlighted the critical role of stakeholder elicitation for decision making of large-scale water projects and identifies the processes through which such information may be included. Before joining Cornell, she was a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Davis with research focus on dynamic and adaptive reservoir operations in the Sacramento San Joaquin river basin.
Email: ss4285@cornell.edu
LinkedIn: Sai Veena Sunkara
CV