Michelle E. Miro is a senior information scientist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy.
Her research supports international, federal, and local emergency, infrastructure, and resource management agencies with climate adaptation, disaster resilience and recovery, and water resources planning. Miro has methodological expertise in water resources modeling, climate data analysis, remote sensing, geospatial analysis, machine learning and decision making under deep uncertainty (DMDU).
Her projects include climate risk analyses of national critical infrastructure, climate vulnerability analyses of water supply and demand plans in Southern California and South America, groundwater management in urban and agricultural regions, transboundary water management under a climate change, and extreme precipitation impacts and planning under a changing climate.
She also serves as a co-investigator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (MARISA) Climate Adaptation Partnership (CAP). Miro co-led the development of Puerto Rico’s water sector recovery plan following Hurricanes Irma and Maria. She has served on two National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Committees - Developing a Strategy to Evaluate the 5th National Climate Assessment (2024) and Review of the Long-Term Operations of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project (2023-2025).
She holds an M.S. in civil engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.