Katie Straus (she/her) is a Doctoral student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign after completing her Master's in the same department. Her research interests include hydrologic land-atmosphere interactions, climate modeling, and climate adaptive engineering. She received her Master's from this department for her thesis research on estimating evapotranspiration in the Cordoba region of the La Plata Basin in Argentina using the observational data from the 2018-2019 RELAMPAGO field campaign under Dr. Francina Dominguez's advisement. She completed a six-week NSF REU research program in 2021 and presented at AGU. Her current research project is focused on quantifying the relationship between precipitation intensity, precipitation effectiveness, soil moisture recharge and droughts. This work is being conducted under the guidance of her PhD advisor and Illinois' State Climatologist, Trent Ford. This work is done using in situ observational datasets from around the state of Illinois with the goal of expanding to CONUS. Katie is also one of the co-chair's for the department's Climate Discussion Group which reviews discusses climate papers in a group setting on a weekly basis.

Katie grew up in the Cleveland area and completed her Bachelor’s in Environmental Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. She previously held research and teaching assistant positions at the University of Cincinnati in the Complex Systems and Processes Lab. Her previous work with UC involved modeling wastewater flow for the City of Cincinnati. The work done with Portland State University’s NSF REU program focused on quantifying the anomalous meteorology preceding and concurrent with the Oregon 2020 Wild Fires. This work was presented virtually at the Fall 2021 AGU conference.