Caroline Adkins

Caroline Adkins is a PhD student in Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. She earned her B.S.E. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University in 2022 and completed her M.S. at Stanford in 2024. Her research focuses on brackish groundwater resources and the management of inland desalination brines. She is the lead developer of the SAWS tool (Screening Alternative Water Sources to Secure American Water Supplies), which combines a robust national database with a user-friendly web application to support high-level viability screening of non-traditional water supplies across the contiguous United States. On the brine valorization front, Caroline is particularly interested in leveraging desalination brines as resource streams to support more sustainable supply chains—especially in the context of low-carbon cement production.