Yiqing “Gracie” Yao received her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from University of California, Davis in March 2021. Her dissertation focuses on intermediate- and long-term conjunctive water management to mitigate chronic groundwater overdraft with the least economic loss for agriculture in arid and semi-arid regions through hydro-economic optimization modeling, with increasing salinity considerations and non-stationary hydrologic uncertainties caused by climate change.

She is currently working on the development of an interdisciplinary hydro-economic programming model of agricultural water and land use to test the impacts of Sustainable Groundwater Management Act on California’s San Joaquin Valley – the agricultural heart of California and home to critically overdrafted aquifers. By incorporating managed aquifer recharge, surface and groundwater conjunctive use, crop dynamics, multi-benefit land repurposing and climate change, the outcomes of the model will help deriving insightful water management policies in the context of the groundbreaking law.