Women's History Month Profile: Kelly Rose

Kelly Rose, PhD, is a Geo-Data Scientist with more than 20 years of service and research experience at NETL. She is also the Technical Director for NETL’s Science-based Ai/Ml Institute (SAMI). Her research focuses on developing novel, science-based, data-driven methods and models for addressing energy and environmental challenges, including NETL’s award-winning Energy Data eXchange® (EDX) ecosystem. Kelly leads collaborative teams to deliver impactful computational data science resources and models in reusable, scalable, and reproducible formats. Her work has been applied to many scientific and societal domains, including Earth science, geoinformatics, research data management and virtualization, climate and metocean, oil spill prevention, mineral and groundwater resources, geohazards, social and environmental justice, materials innovation, infrastructure resiliency, smart cities, and smart systems. She is coauthor on more than 100 public datasets, models, tools, journal publications, and technical studies. Kelly has also mentored more than 50 STEM research interns and fellows, and she supports additional STEM outreach activities. She holds degrees from Denison University (B.S), Virginia Tech (M.S.), and Oregon State University (PhD).

Kelly was born and raised in East Lansing, Michigan, but her career has offered her the chance to live in Ohio, Virginia, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Oregon. She has visited 48 of the 50 states. Through work and personal travel, she has experienced and explored parts of Algeria, South Korea, China, India, Mexico, Canada and multiple countries in Europe.

Why is it important that women are equally represented in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields?

Diversity in any discipline offers the opportunity to benefit from new perspectives and catalyze alternative approaches to addressing a problem or need.

What is one highlight of your career at NETL that you would like to share?

Anyone who embarks on a career in a STEM field is likely driven in part, if not mostly, by curiosity and an appetite to keep learning and growing. Working at NETL for more than 18 years as a federal scientist has afforded me the opportunity to serve as a researcher for our country while evolving and collaborating with colleagues worldwide to address a range of science-driven challenges. I started my career as a classically trained geologist, assessing subsurface systems to improve understanding of the Earth and how to predict its structure and composition from limited knowledge and data. I then embarked on almost a decade of work that involved field exploration, laboratory characterization and computational analysis and data synthesis in collaboration with multi-disciplinary scientists and engineers from around the world.

In the last 10 years, my work has increasingly taken me into the digital realm. It’s also provided the opportunity to mentor and develop an exciting, inspiring and creative team that includes scientists and engineers spanning the geosciences, materials science, data science and computing science-related disciplines. Working with these amazing folks and our collaborators has offered numerous opportunities to develop new methods and models to improve our understanding of Earth, energy and environmental systems while seeing many of these people grow and evolve within their own careers to find their path.

This is what is inspiring to me — the opportunity to grow, evolve and explore alongside amazing colleagues while serving the public. It has been an incredible adventure, one that continues because the questions and challenges about our world require new answers.

What is one of your future career goals?

At this juncture, I hope to see some of our emerging technologies and capabilities mature for broader public benefit. And I am looking forward to seeing how the next generation of scientists and engineers innovate and impact energy and environmental research.

Kelly Rose