Sarah Fletcher
Stanford University, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Climate change is making rainfall and water supplies less predictable. This pushes cities to build costly new water infrastructure, such as reservoirs and treatment plants.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Social Science
- Topics
water resources
water supply infrastructure
water affordability
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2029
What they work on
- Build a multi-scale systems model linking environmental, human and infrastructure dynamics across state, city and household scales to identify what drives household water affordability under climate change.
- Project climate change impacts on urban water supply and demand at the scales that matter for water system outcomes, as input to affordability assessments.
- Use reinforcement learning to design water infrastructure and policy solutions that meet both affordability and reliability targets, working with two partner cities and an advisory board.
- Separate precipitation uncertainty into long-term trends, multi-year climate oscillations and annual variability, and quantify how much each can be reduced through future observations.
- Use stochastic dynamic optimization models to test flexible timing, sizing, modularity and operation of water supply infrastructure in sub-Saharan African river basins with contrasting rainfall patterns.
More about the research
Planning these investments well is hard for two reasons. First, the projects are expensive, and their costs reach households through water bills that many low-income families already struggle to pay. Second, near-term rainfall records mix long-term climate trends with multi-year natural swings, which makes the future hard to read. The lab's two projects use computer models of water systems to design infrastructure and policies that keep water both reliable and affordable under an uncertain climate.
Why it matters
Cities facing a changing climate must spend heavily on water supply without pricing out low-income households. This work could give water planners and policymakers practical tools for choosing lower-cost, flexible infrastructure and more effective water affordability programs. It could help partner cities and river basins in sub-Saharan Africa maintain reliable water supply while keeping bills affordable.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marya Smith
George Washington University, DC·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify and analyze changes in hydroclimatological conditions — river flow, ice and climate variables — in the Kuskokwim basin of Alaska and the Selenge basin of Mongolia that affect human activities and ecosystem services.
Stefano Galelli
Cornell University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize the structural uncertainty that comes from choosing one dam operation model over another, using a computational framework applied to 18 large river basins spanning every major U.S. hydrologic region and about 200 dams.
Christopher Shuler
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop methods to predict the extent and spread of wildfire-related contamination in municipal drinking water systems on Maui, especially for utilities that lack hydraulic models.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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