Water Power Personnel

Asmeret Bier received her Ph.D. in Environmental Science from Washington State University with a focus on system dynamics modeling and environmental policy. After completing internships and a postdoctoral fellowship at Sandia, she joined the Cognitive Modeling Department as a Senior Member of Technical Staff. Asmeret has worked in a variety of fields at Sandia, including nuclear waste repository citing, modeling human behavior, and hydropower operations management. She has experience in system dynamics modeling, uncertainty quantification, sensitivity analysis, validation, and optimization.

Guild Copeland is a Principal Technologist in the Water Power Technologies Department.  He came to Sandia in 1995 after working as the Optical Coating Manager at CVI Laser.  He worked in a material science group at Sandia for more than 15 years and joined the Water Power group in 2011.  He is currently setting up the Sediment Dynamics lab for the study of erosion as it relates to environmental impact of new marine and hydrokinetic installations.  He assists with field test efforts of the Wind Power Technologies Department and also contributes to graphene research in the Nanomaterials Sciences Department.  Guild has Bachelors degree in Physics from the University of New Mexico.

Bernadette A. Hernandez-Sanchez is the project lead for the Advanced Materials Program and DOE’s Marine and Hydrokinetic Technology Database (MHTDB). The Advanced Materials Program focuses on understanding the properties and performance of materials and coatings being investigated for potential marine hydrokinetic (MHK) and ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technologies as well as developing novel anti-biofouling and anti-corrosion coatings. Sandia also supports the update and maintenance DOE’s MHTDB that provides up-to-date information on marine and hydrokinetic renewable energy, both in the U.S. and around the world. Bernadette earned her B.S. in Chemistry from New Mexico Tech and her Ph.D. in Solid State Inorganic Chemistry from Colorado State University. She joined Sandia as a student intern and returned in 2004 as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2008, she became a member of technical staff in Sandia’s Ceramic Processing & Inorganic Materials Department.

Scott James received his BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from UC San Diego with emphases in fluid mechanics and numerical methods. In 2001, he graduated from UC Irvine with a doctorate in Engineering with emphasis on solving environmental flow and transport problems. Shortly thereafter, he joined Sandia National Laboratories’ Performance/Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis Department in Carlsbad, New Mexico, in charge of certifying the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the only operating transuranic nuclear waste repository in the world. Next, he joined the Geohydrology Department in Albuquerque and contributed significantly to the Yucca Mountain Project and International Programs. Scott is currently a Principal Member of the Technical Staff in the Thermal/Fluid Science & Engineering Department at Sandia Labs in Livermore, California, where he continues to work on a wide variety of environmental flow and transport modeling problems. Recently, he has focused on modeling open-channel flow systems in an attempt to optimize algae growth for biofuel production as well as optimizing marine hydrokinetic energy systems.

Thomas Lowry received his Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Portland State University with an emphasis on numerical methods for flow and transport modeling of natural and man-made hydrological systems. His 15+ years of experience includes numerical modeling of hydrologic systems, development of multi-disciplinary integrated decision support systems, system dynamics modeling, uncertainty analysis, and geostatistics. Examples of recent project activities include evaluating the impacts of hydrologic changes due to climate change, investigating the role of model scale on local and regional climate change assessments, development of systems level models in support of risk-based decision making, evaluation and analysis of geothermal energy technologies, and stochastic hydrologic and transport modeling in support of water resources management.

Kelley Ruehl specializes in ocean energy device modeling and analysis.  She recently joined the technical staff at Sandia in 2011, where her research is focused on wave energy and floating offshore wind.  Kelley received a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Oregon State University with emphasis in Ocean Engineering.  At Oregon State University, she was a part of the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center, where her research was in the field of wave energy.  For her Masters thesis, she developed a non-linear time-domain model of a floating point absorber, including power take-off and mooring.