Dr. Renee Obringer’s research interests focus on understanding and evaluating the impact of climate change on urban systems, with an emphasis on water and energy.
Dr. Renee Obringer’s research interests focus on understanding and evaluating the impact of climate change on urban systems, with an emphasis on water and energy. More broadly, she harnesses methods from data science, climatology, and civil engineering to study the nexus between climate change, people, and urban systems. At UNU-INWEH, she investigates climate change impacts and adaptation strategies for complex systems involving large-scale renewable energy generation, hydropower systems, multi-use reservoirs, and water-electricity demand nexus.
Renee’s expertise includes several computational techniques, including machine learning, applied statistics, agent-based modeling, and computational social science methods. She employs these state-of-the-art methodologies to investigate climate change impacts on various systems, both in the near- and long-term, with the aim of developing interpretable models for use by infrastructure managers and policymakers.
Renee is an assistant professor in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State University, where she is also a faculty associate in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. Prior to starting her role at Penn State, Renee worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland. She has a Ph.D. in environmental and ecological engineering from Purdue University and a B.Sc. in Environmental engineering from Ohio State University.