Kate Maher
Kate Maher is a Professor of Earth System Science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. She also serves as a Faculty Director in Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), where she works at the interface of science, decision-making, and systems design. Kate’s research focuses on how natural systems regulate carbon and water, with an emphasis on translating process-based understanding into actionable climate solutions. She combines field observations, physics-based modeling, and data-driven approaches to evaluate how carbon moves through soils, watersheds, and ecosystems, and how these processes can be measured and represented in policy and emerging carbon markets. Her work spans water quality, managed aquifer recharge, soil carbon, and nature-based climate solutions, with a growing focus on how scientific measurement frameworks can support more rigorous environmental decision-making. Kate began working at RMBL in 2015, studying watershed-scale carbon cycling, water quality, and the role of high-elevation ecosystems such as fens. More recently, her work has expanded to include beaver-driven watershed restoration and its implications for hydrology and carbon dynamics across mountain landscapes. RMBL has been central to this work, providing a setting where long-term ecological observations and process-based science can inform broader questions about climate and water resilience. Kate is a recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and her work on the carbon cycle is featured in a permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She received her B.A. from Dartmouth College and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Mendenhall Postdoctoral Fellow with the U.S. Geological Survey prior to joining Stanford. Kate is a part-time resident of Crested Butte with her husband, Matt Rothe. She brings to the Board a perspective that connects long-term, place-based ecological research with emerging needs in climate policy, water resource management, and environmental markets.