Wietske Medema

Wietske Medema, Ph.D. is the Project Manager for the COEQWAL Project with the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. She specializes in water governance, water security and risk, water stewardship, social learning, multi-stakeholder engagement and collaborative processes. Wietske has over 15 years of project management, research, and policy experience in water and environmental projects in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. As Associate Director for the Adaptive and Integrated Water Resources Management Program at McGill University, she developed and supervised water stewardship projects and research partnerships, including with First Nation Tribes. In California, she has worked as a project manager and senior research consultant for the City of Richmond, developing a Green-Blue New Deal Workforce Development Plan to create thousands of green sector jobs, accelerating a just transition to a decarbonized and circular economy. She has also co-founded and worked with several community based organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, empowering youth from frontline communities through environmental programming, community science projects and civic engagement. Her passion for water and the environment has centered around science that serves to resolve socio-environmental issues affecting vulnerable and historically marginalized communities.