Alumni profile: William Lehman
William graduated with a BA in Applied Mathematics and a BA in Economics in 2006. He finished an MS in Economics from OSU in 2008. Here is what William said when asked about how his OSU experience has helped him:
Say a few words about your current job.I am an Economist for the United States Army Corps of Engineers(USACE), I work at the Hydrologic Engineering Center(HEC) in Davis California. HEC is the software development arm of the Institute for Water Resources which is responsible for the forward-looking analysis and research in developing planning methodologies for USACE. My duty is to develop the Flood Impact Analysis tool that will be used by Economists, Hydraulic Engineers, and Planners across the nation and the world to assess the direct and indirect economic impacts of floods, potential life loss from floods, and to geospatially describe the risk in the floodplain with and without flood mitigation projects. My model is one of the leading models to estimate the catastrophic consequences associated with dam and levee failure, to perform project benefit calculations to report to congress, and to analyze the life loss reduction benefit for projects in the floodplain.
How do the things that you learned as a math major help you do this job?As an Economist for the Corps I have to think about the issues from an Economists point of view, but without the underlying math experience that I have I would not be able to write the technical math equations used in our code to describe different processes that take place in the damage calculations, warning disseminations, and population evacuations.
What classes or activities related to the math major have ended up being the most useful after you graduated?Dr. Marvin Keeners class on Math Modeling was one of the most influential classes I took during my math major, and the lessons I learned in that class have formed the way that I think about modeling flood risk with HEC-FIA. I continually draw from his experience when writing technical documentation to describe my methodology, and also use the techniques I learned in his class when I approach a modeling problem so that my assumptions make sense and the way that I solve the problem is not overly complex for the situation.
