Biography

Debra Perrone is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Water in the West program. She is interested in the multifaceted, interrelationship between water, energy, and food resources. Her work explores how the interactions among these resources affect decisions and tradeoffs involved in water resource management. She is be part of an interdisciplinary team that is developing a Western Water Dashboard. She mines, compiles and analyzes environmental, economic and socio-political data to identify factors influencing water use; the main objective of this work is to create helpful and useful visualizations for water-use stakeholders at all levels.

Perrone received her undergraduate degree in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Lafayette College in 2008. An active member of Lafayette’s Engineers Without Borders chapter, she worked on water projects in rural Honduras. After graduation she began the PhD Program in Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University and became a fellow of Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment. In 2011, she was awarded an Environmental Protection Agency STAR fellowship for her research on the water-energy-food nexus. In Summer 2012, she participated in the Young Summer Scientist Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and a year later she was granted a NSF's East Asia Pacific Summer Institute fellowship in Singapore. Perrone graduated in May 2014 and was the Graduate School’s Founder’s Medalist for First Honors.