KC McKanna

KC McKanna obtained her Ph.D. in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources. She is interested in how incentives, both financial and moral, may influence electricity and water consumption. By the end of her program, she hopes to better understand the underlying logic of consumer motivation and use that understanding to develop utility interventions.

KC has always been interested in human behavior and sustainability, and has furthered her understanding of this intersection in a multitude of ways. Before graduate school, she worked at Renew Financial, a clean energy financing start-up, where she and her team developed municipal financing programs to make energy and solar more accessible. Interested in leveraging behavioral science insights to energy and environmental policy she returned to graduate school, first earning a Masters in Public Policy at UCLA and then pursuing her doctorate at Stanford.

“A lot of policy is rooted in a rational actor framework, and I feel like if we can move towards a descriptive human model, we can see pretty large improvements in the way we create our policies”

When KC isn’t researching, you may find her cooking, hiking, or spending time with with her toddlers.