Mary C. Hill, PhD
Model Evaluation, Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis

Dr. Mary Hill, a Princeton-trained hydrologist, is one of the leading global experts in uncertainty analysis. She was with the US Geological Survey (USGS) from 1981-2014 and was promoted to the rank of GS-ST, the highest level possible for government scientists and only the second woman to reach that level in the US Department of Interior.

Mary’s primary research focus is on the future economic possibilities for food/renewable energy/water systems, with emphasis on agriculture and agricultural community adaptation to water depletion and rich renewable energy resources in the central USA. She is also working to combine process-based and agent-based models to explore the interaction of engineered systems, economic development and agricultural communities.

Mary’s work centers on quantification of processes and characteristics of environmental systems, with recent inclusion of associated human systems. At the USGS, she focused on integrating models and data using sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification as applied to groundwater and surface-water systems.

Earth Knowledge’s predictive analytics must involve some level of what is called “uncertainty analysis,” which means that the final analytics can have a margin of error which is calculated and accounted for.  This is a critical part of reliable forecasting and Mary is one of the world’s leading experts on this. 

Mary received her PhD from Princeton University in 1987. She has been a Professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Kansas since 2014.