Principal Investigator, Jonathan Lamontagne
Jonathan Lamontagne received his MS and PhD in environmental water resources systems analysis from Cornell University in 2014 and 2015, respectively. His graduate studies focused on flood frequency analysis and the incorporation of uncertainty in hydropower systems planning. Following his graduate studies, Lamontagne worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University, studying uncertainty and robustness issues for models of the integrated human-climate system. He joined the Tufts Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2017.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Franklyn Kanyako
Franklyn received his PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is a former International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) scholar and member of former United Nations Secretary-General (Ban Ki-moon) Climate Change support team. His research focuses on environmental decision-making under uncertainty in climate policies and uncertainty characterization in global Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs).
Website: http://www.greenafricanow.com/
Gi Joo Kim
Joo received his PhD in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Seoul National University, Korea in 2022. His PhD research focused on both deriving theoretical improvements in reservoir operations and applying them in real-world reservoir management. After working as a postdoctoral researcher at Seoul National University in 2022, Joo joined the Lamontagne Lab in June 2023. His current research focuses on using scenario discovery tools to understand the complex dynamics among multiple sectors in global human-Earth systems
Website: https://gijookim.info/
Graduate Students
Ghazal Shabestanipour
Ghazal is a fifth year PhD candidate. Her research focuses on stochastic watershed modeling and statistical hydrology. She is currently involved in developing robust decision support tools in response to climate change in the northeast United States. Before joining the Tufts Civil Engineering department, Ghazal completed her master’s degree in Environmental Engineering and her bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at Tehran’s Polytechnic, where she investigated the urban ecological potential of the Tehran metropolitan area via GIS and was awarded with an exceptional talent scholarship. She also performed research on gray water reuse as an undergraduate researcher at Tehran’s Polytechnic Office of Sustainability.
Abigail Birnbaum
Abby is a fourth year PhD candidate. Her research focuses on understanding risk and uncertainty in water resources management and planning. Specifically, she is looking at uncertainties acting across different spatial scales in integrated assessment models and their impacts on basin-to-global scale land-water sector interactions. Abby holds a master’s degree in Earth System Science from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Cornell University.
Greg Coyle
Greg joined Tufts’ Environmental and Water Resources Engineering program while working as a staff engineer with the city of Lowell, Massachusetts. He received his Bachelor of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering degree from Northeastern University in Boston, MA. Greg’s research interests generally involve water-quality modeling and decision support systems, and in particular he is interested in improving the integration of hydroinformatics, uncertainty quantification, and decision-making under uncertainty with best practices in simulation-based water-quality modeling. When he is not busy doing research, he prefers to be found enjoying live music or hiking in the woods with his wife and two dogs.
Jake Wessel
Jake is a third year PhD student. His research interests include energy systems modeling under uncertainty and low-carbon electricity futures. He is interested in better understanding how detailed energy systems models can be incorporated into food-energy-water nexus frameworks to inform decision making and better characterize uncertainty. Jake received his master’s degree in Civil Engineering from North Carolina State University, investigating future grid scenarios of the U.S. West Coast power system under stationary weather uncertainty. He received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University.
Ben Manoli
Ben is a first year PhD student. His interests include renewable energy and climate change mitigation. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Connecticut.
Isaac Thompson
Isaac is a first year PhD student. He received his bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and worked as a post-bachelors research assistant at the Joint Global Change Research Institute. He is interested in studying the interplay between water, energy, and food systems.
George Moraites
George is a master’s student studying computer engineering in the Electrical Engineering department through the Tufts 5th-year program. He received his bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering as an undergraduate. He’s interested in the intersection between data science, the environment, and how machine learning can be applied to improve decision-making.
Undergraduate Students
Molly Alcorn
Molly is a senior civil engineering student. As a John. A. Cataldo Scholar in the Lamontagne Lab, she is researching the impact of climate mitigation on water shortages and food and energy prices.
Ella Erskine
Ella is a third-year undergraduate studying geological science and environmental science. She is interested in hydrologic modeling and fluvial impacts on infrastructure resilience.
Alumni
Flannery Dolan
Flannery is an associate policy researcher at RAND Corporation. She received her PhD from Tufts in 2022. Her research focused on finding the economic impact of water and land scarcity and how these impacts are shaped by deep uncertainties (i.e., uncertainties without any agreed upon probability distribution).
Mitch Browne
Mitch was a John A. Cataldo Scholar in the Lamontagne lab in the 2022-2023 academic year. His work focused on modeling storm surge risk in Florida.
Mateo Gomez
Mateo is a water resources engineer at VHB. Mateo received his BS in Environmental Engineering from Tufts in 2021. As a John A. Cataldo Scholar, Mateo studied the drivers of water scarcity using a scenario discovery approach. His research focused on the La Plata and Zambezi river basins located in South America and south-central Africa, respectively.
Sean Murphy
Sean earned his BS in Civil Engineering from Tufts in 2020. He worked with the Lamontagne lab during the last year of his undergraduate as a Cataldo scholar. In his time with the lab, he applied water resources control rule methods to battery energy storage systems to optimize performance in energy markets. He also did research with the Tufts Power Systems and Markets group, and submitted comments to the Massachusetts DOER regarding offshore wind transmission. Sean now works as a design engineer at Nexamp, doing layout, energy modeling, and design engineering for community solar projects all over the US.
Jonas Procton
Jonas is a design engineer at Horsley Witten Group. His work is focused on water resources and ecological restoration. Recent projects include dam removal, culvert replacement, and wetland restoration efforts in the Greater Boston Area. Other areas of practice include watershed planning and green stormwater infrastructure design. Prior to Horsley Witten, Jonas received a BS in Civil Engineering at Tufts in 2019. While at Tufts, Jonas researched the impact of offshore wind development on the New England energy grid.