Katherine Young is the Geothermal Program Manager at the NREL, and has been with NREL since 2008, focusing her research on improving geothermal drilling through innovative use of data and new tools as well as geothermal exploration, regulatory and permitting analyses, and geothermal resource reporting methodologies. Ms. Young has developed innovative tools, such as the Geothermal Reporting Protocol and Optimization Technique, GeoRePORT (https://openei.org/wiki/GeoRePORT), the Geothermal exploration and area case histories on OpenEI (http://en.openei.org/wiki/Gateway:Geothermal), a wiki-based, crowd-sourced information sharing Website; and the Regulatory and Permitting Information Desktop (RAPID) Toolkit (http://en.openei.org/wiki/RAPID), a collection of publicly available information about permits and regulations affecting energy and bulk transmission project development. The resource is intended to facilitate communication between project developers and agency personnel, among agencies at all jurisdictional levels, and among all project stakeholders - including the public. Ms. Young received a bachelor’s degree in geological engineering and geology from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a masters’ degree in Geochemistry from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has also worked as a field engineer for Schlumberger Dowell, a geology instructor, and a database software designer, developer, and trainer.
