Harnessing a keen desire to work on some of the toughest water challenges facing her rural hometown in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Kim became a civil engineer. While she remains inspired by the engineers pushing the boundaries of water reuse and emerging contaminants, she believes the most exciting and impactful changes happening in the water sector are related to policy and governance. In her professional role with us, she keeps tabs on constantly evolving policy changes and funding flows to help utilities fund their priority water and wastewater projects.
Within our North American Funding Program, Kim leads our policy and funding team for her home state of California. Her topical focus is water infrastructure, climate resilience, and governance. Earning her doctorate while working on a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project in Eastern Africa, she investigated how governance structures and organizational collaboration impacted water utilities’ technical, managerial, and financial capacity—this skillset was the reason she was selected as a professional New Face in Civil Engineering by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2021.
If you ask Kim, she’ll say her perfect day is when she’s surrounded by big mountains for 12 hours. She’s a mountaineer, climber, and runner.