Jacob Tracy, Phd, Eit Email & Phone Number

I am a PhD researcher in water resources engineering, focusing on identifying optimal policies and investments in the face of deep uncertainty. Through evaluating, creating, and emulating water systems models, I make sure that feedbacks amongst human-hydrologic systems are included and properly reflected in decision support. I have worked for the World Bank in Mexico City, collaborating with local leaders in government, academia, and civil society to categorize the vulnerabilities of the city's water supply system. With established methods and models not transferrable to the context of Mexico City, working towards robust optimization led to the need for novel means of analysis which formed the backbone of my research. My first project was the creation of a novel method of data-driven dynamic emulation of high-dimensionalmodel outputs that overcame the logistical challenges from assumptions in traditional multivariate statistics. This provided to ability to estimate spatial and temporal dynamics of aquifer depletion and land subsidence hundreds of thousands of times within an optimization framework using the physical model as a basis. The second was an integrated urban water supply model which provides a flexible way to simulate the distribution of water from internal/external sources throughout a city and articulate interactions between separate hydrologic models of supply systems. This was adapted to the the immense size and data coverage of Mexico City, providing speed and flexibility by borrowing from internet network models and embedding nonlinear/logical rules for daily operations of the infrastructure at a daily level. This flexibility was key when I later integrated machine learning hydrologic models of rivers in the data-scarce southern regions of the city as distinct sources to the network. Due to the altered water balance from human occupation, this effort involved integrating remote sensing data, satellite products, and national censuses to differentiate changes in the hydrograph over time as natural or man-made.I hope to advance my career improving how decisions can be evaluated in complex urban systems, where the question of scale and nature of spatial dependence makes decentralized policies difficult to test.

Listed skills include Written Spanish, Water Resource Management, Public Speaking, Hydrologic Modeling, and 25 others.