After being featured in our September Voices in STEM series, PhD Student Madeline Pernat from the University of Colorado-Boulder joined us for an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) to talk more about her water management research.
Dive into the Q&A below!
Q: How do you ensure that the diverse perspectives of stakeholders are considered in your research and policymaking frameworks?
A: The Bureau of Reclamation, which initially funded my research, is doing tremendous work with the Colorado River Basin policy negotiations. One aspect that really stands out is how they’ve engaged so many voices in the conversation — basin states, tribal nations, NGOs, and others. They’ve also made their technical modeling tools accessible to the public, allowing anyone to create and test policy options across a wide range of future scenarios.
My research builds on this inclusive foundation, developing methods that help diverse stakeholders interpret the large volumes of data generated in these complex decision-making processes. This way, stakeholders can better visualize and understand how different policies might impact the specific issues they care about, such as water supply, environmental flows, and other critical factors.
Q: In your opinion, what’s the most underrated tool or technique used in water resource management?
A: My research has definitely influenced my perspective here, but I think Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) are incredibly powerful tools that remain underused in practice, even though they’re decently well-known in academia. MOEAs are especially valuable in complex fields like water management, where we face multiple — oftentimes competing — goals. For instance, in the Colorado River Basin, we need to balance water deliveries, hydropower production, environmental flows, and reservoir levels. Since these objectives naturally conflict, no single policy can perfectly satisfy all of them at once.
This is where MOEAs come in — they help us identify a range of policy options, each balancing these goals in a different way, so that decision makers can then choose the option that best meets their priorities. A high-profile example of MOEAs in action is the Bureau of Reclamation’s use of them in its post-2026 policy development process. Itt is an exciting application of how these tools can shape important, real-world decisions.
Q: What’s the most bizarre or unexpected factor you’ve had to consider in your modeling?
A: I’m not sure there’s anything particularly bizarre, but when I first started working in this area, I was struck by just how many factors are considered! For example, the Colorado River Simulation System (CRSS) — a model developed by the Bureau of Reclamation for long-term planning and the one I use in my research — is incredibly complex. It includes hundreds of interconnected “objects” like river reaches, reservoirs, water users, and groundwater storage.
Each of these objects has multiple associated methods, like hydropower production for reservoirs or routing methods for river reaches. While these methods are simplifications of the real system, it’s incredible to me just how much can actually be represented in the model.
Q: If you had to create a soundtrack for a day in the life of a water researcher, what three songs would definitely make the playlist?
A: