Nima Ehsani, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

Los Angeles, Ca, Us

Rosemead, Ca, Us

Rosemead, Ca, Us

Leading the Big Creek hydropower project's water management team, I implemented strategies that boosted annual project profits by $13.4M, an uplift of 8%. I led a process improvement project, converging cross-functional teams from Asset Optimization and Energy Markets, catalyzing a shift from a $1.6M annual loss to a $1.8M annual profit, signifying a $3.4M improvement. This was accomplished by enhancing our bidding strategy in the CAISO market. In another strategic collaboration, we redesigned our pump-storage hydro bidding approach, resulting in an additional profit of $5M annually. I led the development of an Ensemble Streamflow Prediction System (ESP), yielding a profit increase of $5M.

Rosemead, Ca, Us

I streamlined and automated critical planning processes, dramatically decreasing the execution cycle time from a day to a mere five minutes. In my capacity as a subject matter expert in water resources and climate change, I extended support for various projects across SCE. Additionally, I offered advisory services for post-wildfire flooding assessments and executed cost-benefit analyses for diverse capex and maintenance scenarios.

Notre Dame, Indiana, Us

I led a research project focused on quantifying the benefits of agricultural best management practices on the transport of phosphorus and nitrogen from farms into rivers. Through the analysis of an ensemble of 60 high-resolution, dynamically downscaled climate change scenarios, derived from CMIP5 RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, we concluded that planting winter cover crops over row-cropped land areas constitutes a robust climate change adaptation strategy for reducing nutrient losses from agricultural lands and enhances climate resilience in response to a projected warmer and wetter future climate.

I led a research project aimed at quantifying the effects of climate change on the temperature and streamflow of key watersheds along the Atlantic Coast of the US. I developed high- resolution models that were calibrated against USGS observations utilizing a Genetic Algorithm based optimization technique adapted for High-Performance Computing systems. Our simulations, based on an ensemble of 40 General Circulation Models (GCMs) from the CMIP5 RCP4.5 and RCP 8.5, demonstrated reductions in summer streamflow by up to 25% and increases in winter by as much as 67%. Notably, water temperatures increased by up to 6.2°C during the summer.

New York, New York, Us

As the lead researcher of a regional-scale research project, I leveraged the minimal setting scenarios of the ISI–MIP, encompassing all four RCPs for the HadGEM2-ES GCM, to estimate the impacts of climate change on water resource infrastructure, dams, and hydropower, in the Northeast United States. Utilizing artificial neural networks, I developed a reservoir operation model for integration with hydrologic models. The research underscored that the importance of dams in providing regional water security will increase in the future. Adjusting dam operations to mitigate vulnerabilities of water resource systems to future climate uncertainties is vital. Additionally, the research emphasized the potential need to augment both the storage capacity and the number of dams. We observed an 8% decline in annual hydroelectricity generation in regions exhibiting significant seasonal streamflow variation due to projected climate change. I also deduced that the hydropower potential of non-powered dams across the Northeast United States amounts to approximately 48 TWh, compared to the existing 41 TWh hydroelectricity generation.

Contributed to various research initiatives centered on snow remote sensing and sensor technology advancement.

Master Of Business Administration - Mba

Ph.D., Civil And Environmental Engineering