Michelle E. Miro is an engineer at the RAND Corporation with expertise in water resources policy and management, climate resilience planning, remote sensing, geospatial analysis, and machine learning.
She co-led the development of Puerto Rico's water sector recovery plan, including a strategic review of and recommendations for drinking water, wastewater, stormwater and flood control infrastructure projects, system operations, and long-term planning. She also works on hurricane recovery in the United States Virgin Islands.
She is a co-investigator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (MARISA) program, where she leads coastal resilience and stormwater management research, and serves as a co-investigator on a National Academy of Science coastal resilience grant focused on flood risk and climate resilience for communities in the Gulf of Mexico.
Miro has carried out and co-led projects that apply methods for decision making under deep uncertainty (DMDU) to water resources agencies and utilities in Southern California and South America. Her portfolio of work also includes projects on groundwater management in urban and agricultural regions, quantifying sustainable yield under California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, downscaling remote sensing datasets from NASA's GRACE satellite, collaborative climate planning in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, and transboundary water management between India and Pakistan.
Miro has a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.S. in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in humanities from the University of Texas at Austin.
Selected Publications
Miro, M., Marlier, M. and R. Girven, Transboundary Environmental Stressors on India-Pakistan Relations, RAND Corporation (RR-2715), 2019
Miro, M., Groves, D., Catt, D. and B. Miller, Estimating Future Water Demand for San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District, RAND Corporation (WR-1288-SBVMWD), 2018
Miro, M., Romita Grocholski, K., DeGaetano, A. and S. Borisoff, Chesapeake Bay Climate Impacts Summary and Outlook, Summer 2019, RAND Corporation (TL-313v3-NOAA)
Preston, B., Miro, M., Brenner, P., Gilmore, C., Madrigano, J., Raffensperger, J., Catt, D., and A. Huttinger, Beyond Recovery – Transforming Puerto Rico’s Water Sector in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, RAND Corporation (RR-2608-DHS), 2020 (forthcoming)
Miro, M., Best, K., Kaynar, N., Kirpes, R. and A. Najera Chesler , "Approaches to analyzing the vulnerability of community water systems to groundwater contamination in Los Angeles County," Research in Mathematics and Public Policy, 2020 (forthcoming)
Miro, M. and J. Famiglietti , "Downscaling GRACE remote sensing datasets to high-resolution groundwater maps of California’s Central Valley," Remote Sensing, 10(143), 2018
Miro, M. and J. Famiglietti , "A framework for quantifying sustainable yield under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA)," Journal of Sustainable Water Resources Management, 2018
