Katie Straus (she/her) is a first year master’s student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include hydrologic land-atmosphere interactions, climate modeling, and climate adaptive engineering. She completed a six-week NSF REU research program in 2021 and presented at AGU. She has joined Dr. Francine Dominguez’s Hydrometeorology Group. Her current research project is focused on profiling the evapotranspiration measurements from the Argentinian 2018 RELAMPAGO field campaign Integrated Surface Flux System (ISFS) towers. This research seeks to compare locations measurements based off of characteristics and later validate which models capture the land-atmosphere hydrometeorological interactions.

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 during the Oregon 2020 Wild Fires. This work was presented virtually at the Fall 2021 AGU conference.