The Texas Water Resources Institute continues to grow, with the addition of four new staff members at the College Station office.
Hillary Alamene joined in August as a program aide. Alamene assists with field monitoring and GIS mapping. She recently completed her master’s degree in public health at Texas A&M University, where she took courses in epidemiology and environmental health, and is now working towards completing a graduate certificate in GIS.
Before coming to Texas A&M University, Alamene attended the University of Notre Dame.
Karen Hubbard began in August as a project manager, where she provides day-to-day operational and project management support across the institute’s applied research, outreach, and extension portfolio. In this role, she coordinates project timelines, budgets, reporting requirements, and deliverables to help ensure successful project implementation and compliance with sponsor requirements. Hubbard also supports proposal development by compiling and formatting narrative sections, budgets, CVs, and letters of support for grant submissions.
Prior to TWRI, Hubbard gained experience in research administration, proposal development, budget management, and pre-award administration. She has worked with projects funded by agencies including the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, providing administrative support for grant development, reporting, and financial management.
Hubbard earned a bachelor of science in Animal Science from Texas A&M University in 2017. Her professional interests include research administration, project management, and supporting collaborative efforts that advance science-based solutions to natural resource and agricultural challenges.
Anamika Das Kona started in her role as a Program Specialist in September. She uses geospatial mapping to support Arroyo Colorado watershed efforts while contributing to monitoring activities that connect environmental data with practical watershed management.
Before joining TWRI, she completed her master’s in ocean and Earth sciences at Old Dominion University, where her research focused on seagrass metabolism and the impacts of climate change on seagrass dynamics in Chesapeake Bay. She also contributed to an U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-supported project focused on mapping seagrass distribution throughout the Chesapeake Bay and a NASA Carbon Monitoring System project that examined the role of seagrass ecosystems in carbon sequestration.
She received her bachelor’s in oceanography from the University of Chittagong in Bangladesh. Her background spans coastal and marine ecosystems, environmental monitoring, geospatial analysis, ecological modeling, and the use of environmental data to better understand changing aquatic systems. She is particularly interested in how mapping, monitoring, and scientific analysis can be used together to inform resource management and environmental protection.
Emmanuel Okolo, Ph.D., also joined in September as a program aide and conducts interdisciplinary research on agricultural water management and conservation, integrating surveys, interviews, and field studies to analyze landowner decision-making and environmental practices. He manages and interprets quantitative and qualitative data, develops and tests research hypotheses, and disseminates findings through scholarly publications and collaborative projects.
Okolo recently successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation at Texas A&M and holds a master’s in agricultural education from Texas Tech University and a bachelor’s in agricultural economics, management and extension from Ebonyi State University.
