Newsha Ajami is finishing her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Her doctoral research focuses on improving hydrological forecasting using multi model combination techniques to improve management of water resources.

Ajami received her B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Tehran Poly Technique, Tehran, Iran. She earned her M.S. in Hydrology and Water Resources from the University of Arizona, where she studied development and calibration of distributed hydrologic models.

While studying for her Master's degree, Ajami became interested in connections between engineering, science, and public policy, and she took classes and worked on projects related to water policy and sustainable design. She plans to pursue a faculty position at a leading U.S. university so she can pursue her passion for perpetual learning and teaching. She hopes to spend more time building bridges between the scientific community and policy makers through her multidisciplinary research.

She is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Meteorological Society, for which she was a June 2005 Science and Policy Colloquium Fellow.