Newsha Ajami

Newsha K. Ajami
Chief Research Strategy and Development Officer, Earth and Environmental Sciences
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U.S. Energy Dept.

Keynote: Just Add Water: Building A Climate Resilient and Equitable Future

A leading expert in sustainable water resource management, smart cities and the water-energy-food nexus, Newsha Ajami uses data science principles to study human and policy dimensions of urban water and hydrologic systems. In her role at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which is managed for the U.S. Energy Dept. by the University of California, she is focused on developing interdisciplinary and impact focused research initiatives across various domains within EESA.

Dr. Ajami was a two-term gubernatorial appointee to the Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board and now is a mayoral appointee to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. She is a member of the National Academies board on Water Science and Technology and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute. Before joining Berkeley Lab, Dr. Ajami was founding director of the Stanford Urban Water Policy program and a senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Earlier, she was a Science and Technology Fellow for the California State Senate’s Natural Resources and Water Committee working on water and energy related legislation. Dr. Ajami received her PhD in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California-Irvine, an MS in hydrology and water resources from the University of Arizona and a BS in civil engineering from Amir Kabir University of Technology in Teheran, Iran.


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