Kimberly Nicholas Cahill

Kim Nicholas Cahill’s interest in agriculture is rooted in five generations of family farming in Sonoma, California. She came to Stanford in 2003 as a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Stanford Graduate Fellow with experience in both ecological field research and public policy. She has collaborated on several projects to date exploring the links between weather and crop yields in California’s $30 billion agriculture industry, with a focus on California’s unique perennial crops, particularly wine grapes. Her work on potential future wine grape quality has been covered in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and BBC News. Her current research investigates the interaction between ecological and social components in the system of winegrowing, with the goal of understanding how the system may be vulnerable or resilient to changes in the future. Kim is a Viticulture Associate at UC Davis, where she is collaborating with several professors and graduate students on projects linking wine grape quality with environmental and management influences.

Kim holds a Master's degree in Land Resources from the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied management impacts on biological carbon sequestration in a restored prairie and helped write the protocol for monitoring biological carbon sequestration for a new state greenhouse gas emission registry. From 2002-2003, Kim was a National Science Foundation GK-12 Teaching Fellow, where she developed and implemented inquiry-driven science programs with elementary, high school, and college students and teachers.

From 1999-2001, Kim was a policy analyst at Clean Air Council in Philadelphia and Coordinator of a U.S. Department of Energy partnership to promote alternative fuel vehicles, where she was awarded the National Coordinator Achievement Recognition Award. This work was motivated by her senior honors thesis, which evaluated the social and public costs and benefits of alternative fuel vehicles in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Earth Systems and a minor in Human Biology from Stanford, where she participated in undergraduate research opportunities in the White-Inyo Mountains of California, the tundra of Alaska, and the grasslands of Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, focusing on ecosystem response to global change.