Mary C. Hill Email & Phone Number

At KU, I work to use science to inform ongoing dramatic changes in policy, economics, and social systems prompted by evolving technology, population, climate, and natural resource limitations. This involves identifying and serving stakeholder needs -- local stakeholders are where the greatest burden of change will fall. Most recently, we obtained an NSF INFEWS grant called FEWtures. See https://news.ku.edu/2019/10/17/new-research-will-explore-renewable-energy-water-treatment-ammonia-production-bolster This broader perspective about science also includes bringing a wider range of perspectives into standard courses like Physical Hydrogeology, and the development of new courses like my Freshman Honors course "Food, Energy, Water, the Environment, and Public Policy -- Opportunities and Trade-offs". If you are a student seeking to make a difference in the future of people on earth, please consider the KU Department of Geology.Much of my career was in the realm of integrating models and data, including uncertainty quantification and identifying dominating parameters and processes. I focused on exploring the utility of computationally frugal sensitivity analysis and uncertainty methods. Computational frugality is important for analyses to be accomplished in real time in decision support software. I have experience modeling saltwater intrusion, groundwater supply, stream interaction, solute transport, and regional groundwater flow and transport beneath the Yucca Mountain proposed USA high-level nuclear waste disposal site. A recent article (Barron and Hill 2018, Energy Policy) evaluates the effect of realistically simulated waste disposal and long-term discount rates on the role of nuclear energy in a carbon-free future.I have received awards from the ASCE, the NGWA and IAHS. I am a Fellow of GSA and AGU. I have authored over 150 articles and reports, and software in the fields of subsurface hydrology, solvers, sensitivity analysis, parameter estimation, and uncertainty analysis. As a GS-ST, I was at the highest promotion level attainable by a U.S. government scientist when I retired from the US Geological Survey to accept a professorship at University of Kansas Department of Geology in 2014.

Listed skills include Groundwater Modeling, Hydrology, Water Resources, Groundwater, and 43 others.