Announcing a new “office hours” mentoring program for early career members

Dear DMDU members,

The leadership team is starting a virtual “office hour” program for early career members who would like to receive career guidance from other members (“mentors”). We will set up meetings every month or twice a month (depending on the number of mentors), during which a mentor will be available for an hour to answer questions.

To kick-off the program, members (or former members) of the leadership team have volunteered to be mentors and make their virtual office available to provide career advice. But mentorship is open to all the members of the Society; please reach out to me (jrozenberg@worldbank.org) if you’d like to volunteer to be a mentor.

Below is the list of upcoming office hour mentors. We will be in touch soon with dates and links to the meetings!

Best wishes on behalf of the leadership team

Julie Rozenberg

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September: Nidhi Kalra
Nidhi Kalra (she/her) is a senior information scientist at the RAND Corporation. She has previously served as director of RAND’s San Francisco Bay Area office and codirector of RAND’s Center for Decision Making Under Uncertainty. Her research focuses on autonomous vehicle policy, climate change adaptation, and tools and methods that help people and organizations make better decisions amid deep uncertainty. She spearheads RAND’s autonomous vehicle policy work. Kalra is the lead author of the study “Driving to Safety: How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability? (2016)” and coauthor of the flagship report “Autonomous Vehicle Technology: A Guide for Policymakers (2016).” She has over ten years of experience in autonomous vehicle policy and is committed to using her expertise to further evidence-based policy making. She has testified on autonomous vehicle policy at three congressional hearings. Kalra also helps organizations improve how they make robust decisions, particularly in the face of climate change.

In 2018, Kalra served as senior technology policy adviser to U.S. Senator Kamala D. Harris. In 2013, she served as a senior decision scientist in the Office of the Chief Economist of Sustainable Development at the World Bank, where she helped launch the World Bank’s portfolio in robust decisionmaking. Kalra developed educational technology tools to promote literacy among blind children in India, a project that went on to receive the Louis Braille Touch of Genius Prize for Innovation. She received her Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

September: Antonia Hadjimichael
Antonia Hadjimichael is a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University and will be joining Penn State University as an Assistant Professor in 2022. She has studied in the UK and Spain and has a background in mathematics, environmental modeling, and urban wastewater systems management. Her work focusses on resilience planning for water resources systems, while considering multisector dynamics and deep uncertainty.

October: Julie Rozenberg
Julie Rozenberg is a Senior Economist at the World Bank, where she has worked for the past 7 years. She currently develops country-level strategies on climate change adaptation and mitigation. In previous positions, she contributed to World Bank flagship reports on climate change (“Shockwaves”, “Decarbonizing Development”, “The Adaptation Principles”) and co-led two major reports on infrastructure: “Beyond the Gap: how countries can afford the infrastructure they need while protecting the planet” and “Lifelines: the resilient infrastructure opportunity”. Her research focuses on the application of DMDU methods for economic modeling. Julie Rozenberg holds an engineering degree and a PhD in economics.

October: Rob Lempert
Robert Lempert is a principal researcher at the RAND Corporation and Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition. His research focuses on risk management and decision-making under conditions of deep uncertainty.  Dr. Lempert is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and convening lead author for Working Group II of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. Dr. Lempert is a 2020 Biennial Medal Winner of International Environmental Modeling and Software Society, was the Inaugural EADS Distinguished Visitor in Energy and Environment at the American Academy in Berlin, and served as the inaugural president of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (http://www.deepuncertainty.org). A Professor of Policy Analysis in the Pardee RAND Graduate School, Dr. Lempert is a co-author of the book Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Longer-Term Policy Analysis.

November: Jan Kwakkel
Jan Kwakkel is an associate professor at TU Delft. His research interest is model-based support for decision making under deep uncertainty. His research focuses on the developing and testing innovative model-based techniques for the design of dynamic adaptive policy pathways. Within this, he is particularly interested in how to bring moral considerations into the quantitative analysis. He has applied his research in a range of domains including climate adaptation, flood risk management, transport and logistics, resource economics, and national safety and security. He is the lead developer of an open source workbench for exploratory modeling, scenario discovery, and multi-objective robust optimization. Next to his research on decision making under deep uncertainty, Dr. Kwakkel also has an interested in text mining with a focus on analyzing scientific publications and patents.

November: Steven Popper
STEVEN W. POPPER (PhD, Economics, U. of California, Berkeley) is a RAND Senior Economist and Professor of Science and Technology Policy in the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His work on micro level economic transition focuses on the area of technological change. From 1996 to 2001 he was the Associate Director of the Science and Technology Policy Institute (S&TPI) which provided research and analytic support to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other agencies of the U.S. executive branch.  His S&TPI work included principal authorship of the Fourth U.S. National Critical Technologies Review, advice on federal R&D portfolio decision making for the National Science Board, and authorship of Presidential transition documents on S&T issues of national importance. He is an elected AAAS Fellow and served as the chair of its section on industrial science and technology. Dr. Popper’s work on strategy development and foresight has focused on the problem of planning under conditions of deep uncertainty He is co-developer of Robust Decision Making, a methodological framework for analytical decision support under deep uncertainty. He also led the team which developed the Systematic Technology Reconnaissance, Evaluation and Adoption Methodology (STREAM) for the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council to provide support for making informed, mission-specific adoption decisions over innovative technologies. Dr. Popper is co-editor of Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice (Springer) the first handbook of DMDU methods and was the founding chair for education and training of the international Society for Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty.