Kate Brauman

Kate Brauman is thrilled to be a member of IPER’s third class and to take advantage of IPER’s diverse strengths as she explores her interests in fresh water resources.  She comes to Stanford with both a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Stanford Graduate Fellowship.

Kate graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Columbia College, Columbia University in 2000.  At Columbia she was an independent major in Science and Religion with a science emphasis primarily in biology and a humanities focus on comparative religion and religious philosophy.  Kate has always been interested in why people ask certain kinds of questions, and she wrote her senior thesis about the influence of Medieval Christian conceptions of the physical world on modern experimental science.  Kate’s independent

major helped pave the way for a Center for the Study of Science and Religion, founded by her advisor and still thriving in Columbia’s Earth Institute.

After graduation, Kate spent three years working for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a non-profit, national environmental advocacy organization.  As NRDC’s Public Education senior associate, Kate responded to inquires about environmental issues and helped develop, write, and produce educational materials.  At NRDC, Kate was exposed to a broad range of environmental issues, and she got a first-hand taste of what issues are important to the public and how the public interacts with the environment. Kate left NRDC with a strong commitment to expanding the knowledge base needed to solve environmental problems and an equally strong conviction that environmental problems are human problems and that they cannot be solved without addressing human needs.

After quitting her job and driving around the US for five months, reveling in both natural wonders and homegrown Americana (yes, she has seen the world’s largest ball of twine), Kate arrived at Stanford.  Now a third-year graduate student, her work brings together the study of plant-water relations with economics and policy to address watershed valuation and conservation.  She is leading a project on the dry side of the Big Island of Hawai’i, where she hopes to help landowners offset financial pressure to convert their land to residential development and encourage downstream users to manage water source areas in innovative ways by creating a framework to compensate landowners for the water supplied by their lands.  In doing so, her aim is to simultaneously improve water supply and integrate conservation into the delivery of vital water services.  Instead of simply noting that watershed protection is important, she seeks to identify how and to what extent different types of land cover produce water supply services.  To do so, she is calculating the difference in aquifer recharge under forest and pasture and assessing the value of each land-cover type for water supply, a value on which the city might base compensation.