Congratulations to Kimberly Fewless: UCAR’s next President’s Leadership Fellow

Kimberly Fewless was selected as the next UCAR President’s Leadership Fellow. This 6- to 12-month program allows emerging leaders to gain real-world experience and develop high-level leadership skills. Kim will lead a project designed to bridge communities across UCAR, NSF NCAR, UCP, and university partners as well as engage with practitioners, policy makers, the private sector, and/or nongovernmental organizations, with a focus on water systems and their predictability. The project aims to increase the scale and pace of translational research – advancing research discoveries into tangible solutions – and accelerate capacity for convergence research.

This award represents the culmination of Kim's past research work at the interface of water, policy, and climate change. Prior to joining RAL, Kim participated in the NSF InTERFEWS (Interdisciplinary Training and Education in Food Energy Water Systems) program as part of her PhD program, and conducted research for the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Kim joined NSF NCAR to work on a USGS-funded project on water-use data availability and sharing. Alongside Olga Wilhelmi and Mari Tye, Kim authored a paper discussing their USGS study of water-use data availability, barriers to access, and the complexities that hinder sharing. (Fewless et al., 2025.  Resilient and Sustainable Water Resources Management in the United States: The Role of Water-Use Data and Interagency Knowledge Exchange. Journal of the American Water Resources Association) The project involved over 70 interviews with State water agencies, resulting in new connections with water-focused institutions and a deeper understanding of water management and governance. 

Following that project, Kim was part of a team, led by Olga Wilhelmi, awarded a NSF NCAR President’s Strategic Initiative Fund project. That project assessed the representation of human water use in NSF NCAR models and convened water practitioners, modelers, and researchers in a workshop to identify opportunities for collaborative research at the intersection of human water use, decision making, and Earth Systems modeling. In addition to her Leadership Fellowship project and the PSIF, Kim is working on a Hydro-themed project under the Convergence Science Program, identifying water-sector climate information needs from the newly developed NA-CORDEX dataset, and supporting community engagement activities for the NASA Climate Resilient Communities project.