Michelle E. Miro is a senior information scientist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She has a broad portfolio of work across climate resilience and adaptation for critical infrastructure, with a focus on the water sector.
Her research supports international, federal, and local emergency, infrastructure, and resource management agencies with climate adaptation, disaster resilience and recovery, and water resources planning. Miro has methodological expertise in water resources modeling, climate data analysis, remote sensing, geospatial analysis, machine learning and decision making under deep uncertainty (DMDU).
Her projects include climate risk analyses of national critical infrastructure, climate vulnerability analyses of water supply and demand plans in Southern California and South America, groundwater management in urban and agricultural regions, transboundary water management under a climate change, and extreme precipitation impacts and planning under a changing climate.
She also serves as a co-investigator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (MARISA) Climate Adaptation Partnership (CAP). Miro co-led the development of Puerto Rico’s water sector recovery plan following Hurricanes Irma and Maria.
She holds an MS in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ph.D. in water resources engineering, UCLA; M.S. in water resources engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; B.A. in humanities, University of Texas at Austin
