Alumni profile: Karina Herrera, A.B. '13

Growing up in the agricultural valley of Fresno, California, Karina Herrera quickly developed an interest in the environment and natural world. But it wasn’t until she became an environmental science and engineering concentrator at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) where she found her true passion: water. From her introductory environmental engineering class, she began to learn the foundational science of water conservation, distribution and filtration, and her club experience in Harvard’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) put the theory into practice. She was part of a team that designed a well, water treatment system and distribution apparatus for a community in the Dominican Republic.

“Working on a water project in the Dominican Republic, seeing the actual impacts water quality has, while also taking a class on the entire process of water filtration, I could see how what happens in a lab is then applied in cities,” Herrera said. “We needed to figure out how to apply it in a community with very limited water infrastructure.”

Experiences like EWB, which put her at the intersection of science and real-world need, have inspired many of the career choices she’s made in the 10+ years since Herrera graduated. She’d eventually get a master’s degree in environmental science and management from the University of California-Santa Barbara, a program that focused more on policy than pure research. From there, she became an engineering intern for the water district of Goleta, a town close to Santa Barbara, before spending a year as a researcher at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.

“It’s definitely never been just science for the sake of science with me,” she said. “It’s always about how science interacts with society.”

Herrera, A.B. '13, has spent the last five years working for the California State Water Resources Control Board, where she’s currently a senior environmental scientist. Her department has primarily focused on designing and implementing the “Making Conservation a California Way of Life” state regulation, which was adopted in July 2024. The program is designed to avoid the blanket, statewide water usage reduction mandates that were previously the common response to droughts. The new regulation is designed to tailor reductions to individual cities and urban centers, relying on data to determine more reasonable efficiency goals based on local capability.

“A lot of cities have complained that across-the-board reductions are unfair,” Herrera said. “If a city is already super efficient, a 20% reduction is a huge cut for them. If a city has historically been pretty wasteful when it comes to conservation, it’s a lot easier for them to cut. We look at the population and irrigated landscapes in households. We use each city’s unique characteristics to determine where they should be in terms of efficiency. Hopefully that ensures that each city is truly efficient.”

Because Herrera’s work focuses on long-term water conservation and efficiency, her team wasn’t directly involved with the emergency response to the recent wildfires across Los Angeles. However, she said several of the communities the regulation will impact were affected, and wildfire damage is something they’ll have to consider as they begin collecting water usage data in the coming months.

“For the next time that suppliers have to report on their progress, we have to consider how their water usage has changed when many don’t have houses anymore,” she said.

By middle school, Herrera knew she was headed towards some kind of career in the sciences, and was even in a premedical preparatory program at her school. But she eventually realized the parts of the program she liked best were the ones most focused on science, data and mathematics, leading her to eventually seek a career in engineering. A tour of New England colleges included a stop in Cambridge, and Herrera realized Harvard was the right place for her.

“I wanted to leave California and experience a different lifestyle,” she said. “Out of all the schools that I saw, there was just something about the community and environment at Harvard that felt right. It had strong scientific concentrations, but also liberal arts, which I really enjoyed. I ended up getting a secondary in ethnic studies because I really wanted the balance of both that Harvard offered.”

A similar balance drew Herrera to the California State Water Board in April 2020. She was doing research with the EPA at the time, and while that fellowship could’ve lasted for several more years, Herrera wanted to come home.

“I always had it in mind that I really wanted to work on California water issues,” she said. “So I started to look for jobs that offered a nice balance of analytics, math and science, but also policy and writing. This job offered both. When you grow up in a state that’s very drought-prone, you always have water conservation in mind. It’s drilled into you at a very young age.”

Herrera spent her first four years designing the regulation. Since its adoption, the team has now turned its attention towards implementation.

“A lot of the job is looking at the literature about water efficiency and potential, learning the science and technology, doing data visualization and data storytelling, collecting the data and showing it in a way that anyone can understand,” she said. “But I also spend so much of my time reading statutes and regulations. And there are always potential partnerships that really excite me, and really remind me of the collaborative work I experienced in Engineers Without Borders.”