linkedinpic
Katherine Herleman-1

Katherine Herleman

Senior Advisor (Community Resiliency)

Katherine is the Executive Director of Innovation for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship team. In this position, Katherine grows corporate partnerships to support research and philanthropic activity for Cornell Engineering. Herleman is also a McNair scholar and former Teaching Assistant Development Consultant in the Engineering Learning Initiatives office at Cornell Engineering. Katherine's graduate work at Cornell University focused on industrial waste stream management - conducting geochemical investigations of the Marcellus shale alongside environmental policy analysis in order to identify both the environmental risks and inconsistencies in state regulation of technologically-enhanced, naturally-occurring, radioactive materials (TENORM). Prior work as a McNair Research Scholar at Florida International University focused on characterizing risks to water resources, public health, and public infrastructure in the Greater Miami Area due to sea level rise and other climate change impacts.  

At Herleman's last position, she was the Energy Resiliency and Sustainability Analyst at Ecology & Environment, a Member of WSP, where she served as the co-lead on developing clean energy and climate change resiliency projects in New York State. She is a broadly trained geoscientist who develops municipal solutions for the increasingly complex resiliency challenges which must be addressed by local governments, such as future proofing public infrastructure and preparing vulnerable populations for extreme weather events. 

Katherine also previously served as both the Extension Disaster Education Coordinator for the All-Hazards Preparedness and Response Education Program at Cornell University and as the Public Information Officer for sixty-two county-level offices which comprise the Cornell Cooperative Extension network in New York State, where she engaged in research related to standardizing agricultural damage assessment and automating PIO functions. Prior to that role, she also served the NYSERDA Communities & Local Governments team and NYSDEC Office of Climate Change by developing and implementing both the NYSERDA Clean Energy Communities and NYSDEC Climate Smart Communities programming - uniquely successful, flagship programs currently being replicated across the United States which support local municipal training and action across the disaster cycle.