McLarty named to CEREO leadership

Sasha McLarty, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been named as a co-directorof WSU's Center for Environmental Research, Education & Outreach (CEREO).

She will share leadership of the center with Julie Padowski, research associate professor in the School of the Environment, and replaces Jan Boll, who is stepping down.

CEREO supports interdisciplinary environmental scholarship and engagement. The CEREO network is comprised of over 450 faculty, staff, students, and community members across the WSU system and beyond. The center provides unique opportunities for training and grant development that support their network at every stage of the research process. They work with researchers from developing an initial idea to building a team, writing and administering the grant, and, ultimately, advancing research with a systems-thinking approach. It also aims to transfer technologies and information developed from research activities to agencies, organizations, and individuals in support of WSU's land-grant mission.

In recent years, CEREO has supported research proposals that have been awarded more than $12 million in funding, bringing together faculty from across campus in areas such as regenerative agriculture, wildfire impacts, water management, and forest and wildlife resilience in the face of climate change. In 2021, a team supported by CEREO received a $3 million National Science Foundation Research Traineeship grant for community-engaged scholarship related to water quality around the Columbia River Basin. That program currently supports 18 graduate students.

McLarty conducts research on groundwater and large-scale hydrologic systems. In particular, she seeks to better understand how much water people have, use, and need and how available supplies are changing. Her research interests include water scarcity, the food-energy-water nexus, science for decision support, and water resources management. She has conducted research on the economic value of groundwater during drought and led citizen science campaigns to monitor groundwater in Northeast Brazil and the Columbia River Basin. She has discussed remote sensing of global water stress with congressional members and led capacity building workshops on water resources management in Central Asia.

McLarty holds a master's and PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Irvine, and a bachelor's degree from Stanford University.