Casey De Finnda (Finnerty)

Biography

Dr. Casey De Finnda (formerly Finnerty) joined the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UC Davis in 2024. Starting out as a chemical engineer at UC Berkeley, Casey’s first introduction to water quality improvement was through an internship with blueEnergy in Bluefields, Nicaragua in 2012—where surveyed households on their use of biosand filters and designed/constructed a composting latrine. Fascinated by water treatment technologies, Casey went on to be a technical service engineer for the membrane manufacturing company, TriSep Corporation (now Mann+Hummel), where he was introduced to membrane filtration. Experiencing firsthand both the strengths and weaknesses of membrane technologies, Casey returned to UC Berkeley to pursue his Ph.D. in environmental engineering, working with Professor Baoxia Mi to explore how advances in material science could be used to develop a more sustainable approach to desalination. During this time, Casey also worked as a water treatment expert for the Berkeley-based startup SimpleWater (now Simple Lab), providing customer support and developing a product recommendation platform. After receiving his doctoral degree, Casey worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University with Menachem Elimelech, where he engaged stakeholders to understand the emerging field of municipal wastewater reuse concentrate (MWRC) management and used machine learning to evaluate the uptake of alternative water supplies like seawater desalination and potable water reuse.

Through these experiences, it became apparent to Casey that “water challenges” are rarely siloed to the water sector alone, but are inextricably tangled in our energy, food, environmental, and societal systems. To address this, Casey launched the Water-Nexus Lab with hopes to develop effective socio-technical interventions that revitalize our infrastructure to better serve the public and close the loop of wastewater management by facilitating water reuse, enabling resource recovery, and mitigating pollution. The Water-Nexus Lab specializes in stakeholder engagement, techno-economic analyses for water technologies, and the development of novel desalination and resource recovery processes.

Outside of research, Casey enjoys running, hiking, traveling, playing pickleball, and pretty much anything to do with the beach. Historically, Casey has been very bad at maintaining his hobbies, but his current pastime is learning how to paint. Some of Casey’s favorite things about Davis include the weather (Davis enjoys blue skies ~280 days out of the year), the 52 miles of bike paths that make Davis the “Bike Capital of America”, Davis’ spectacular sunrises and sunsets, and how friendly everyone is.