Titles

• S3 Research Aide, Sustainability Solutions Services, Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives

Biography

Olga Epshtein is a research aide with the Sustainability Solutions Services (S³). In this capacity, she has led the development of an economic viability model for scenario-based analysis of restorative forest thinning and utilization strategies, and the creation of a decision support tool intended to aid policymakers and stakeholders frame regional material flow as an economic development opportunity.

Prior to joining S³, Olga has worked with the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research project, the HydroEcological Engineering Advanced Decision Support group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Wetland Ecosystem Ecology Lab in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, and the Sustainable Infrastructures for Energy and Water Systems partnership between the Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and the University of Georgia.  She is interested in modeling the feedbacks between anthropogenic landscape modifications and natural resource management decisions, and regional-scale changes in water, carbon, and energy cycling – with the intent to quantify the implications of these for ecosystem and human health.  

Education

• BSE, Civil Engineering, Arizona State University, 2013

Expertise

• environmental and ecological engineering
• decision making
• modeling and simulation
• geographic information science
• numerical modeling
• remote sensing