Jeff Hicks, Director of Digital Solutions at The Water Institute, has more than 15 years of experience leading teams to scale environmental applied research into data-driven decision support applications.

Through his work on Climate.gov, the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, and the National Climate Assessment, Jeff helped to develop many foundational climate data analyses and decision support tools used nationally in government and private industry. Through his career, Jeff also led or supported development of several high-profile environmental planning and assessment applications for DoD, NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Forest Service, and Los Alamos National Laboratory; and for a global set of companies including ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Intel, Honeywell, and Kodak; and dozens of state, regional, and local governments.

Prior to joining The Water Institute, Hicks led Fernleaf Interactive which he co-founded in 2014 as a private company spinoff of the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC) at the University of North Carolina Asheville; Fernleaf continues to expand the reach of the NEMAC’s applied research in community climate resilience by advising dozens of local and regional governments nationwide. Jeff was previously a software engineer with Locus Technologies and a geospatial software engineer with NEMAC. He received his bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from the University of North Carolina at Asheville.