Jennie Rice

Jennie Rice is a senior research scientist at PNNL’s Joint Global Change Research Institute. Her technical background includes decision sciences, economics, and systems engineering, and she has an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. Before joining PNNL, she spent 15 years in private and public sector consulting, primarily in the energy and natural resource sectors, developing quantitative decision support tools for climate change mitigation and adaptation, capacity expansion planning, water resource infrastructure management, weather risk management, and urban and land use planning. She has been with PNNL for 8 years leading fundamental science research to represent the interactions between human and natural systems, including their responses to short-term shocks and long-term stressors such as drought, heat waves, and climate change. She is currently the Principal Investigator for the Integrated Multisector, Multiscale Modeling (IM3) Science Focus area for DOE’s Office of Science – a collaboration between 4 national labs and 6 universities. Currently, IM3 is studying the influences of future heat waves on urban microclimates and the supply, demand, and operations of the regional electric grids; the impact of future droughts and land use and land cover change on surface and groundwater management across the U.S.; and the potential benefits of drought adaptations in the Upper Colorado River Basin in the Western U.S., including the use of financial risk instruments. She is also part of PNNL's Integrated Water and Power Resilience project for DOE’s Water Power Technologies Office to support coordinated resilience planning across the water and power sectors.