Kassandra Grimes

Kassandra Grimes is an ORISE Fellow in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. She is working with the Building Technologies Office’s Commercial Buildings Integration program to support their goals of advancing energy-efficiency solutions for commercial buildings and strengthening the energy-efficiency workforce.

She recently completed a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Virginia as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her dissertation research focused on evaluating a sustainable wastewater treatment technology for the treatment of constituents that stimulate antibiotic resistance in bacteria in the environment. She holds a master's degree from the University of Virginia and a bachelor's from Rowan University, both in civil and environmental engineering. She was a 2019 Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where she worked on diversity and STEM education initiatives for the EngineerGirl program.

In January 2020, she was appointed to the Students, Post-Doctoral, and Early Career subcommittee of the President’s Council of Advisors in Science and Technology. She was also a 2020 selected fellow for the Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps program.