Catching up with Sonoma Valley High grad David DeSmet, ‘10

The Sonoma Valley High grad is now enrolled in Ph.D. program focused on renewable energy.|

Before graduating in 2010, David DeSmet had the distinction of being Sonoma Valley High School’s very first Mr. Dragon.

He took a chance competing in a unique school event that is now an annual tradition.

DeSmet is comfortable with unusual. Today, he is living in Los Angeles and participating in a unusual doctoral program focused on public policy. The Pardee RAND Graduate School is a small multidisciplinary full-time doctoral program backed by the nonprofit RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan research institution focused on policy and decision making through research and analysis.

“I can’t think of another think tank that does something like this,” DeSmet said. “Instead of serving as undergraduate teaching or research assistants, we help RAND with their projects and get hands-on experience.”

Prior to starting his PhD program, DeSmet received a master’s degree in environmental engineering from Carnegie Mellon and undergraduate degree in materials science and engineering from UC Berkeley. He also worked for the Army Corps of Engineers in Boston in its Research and Decision Science lab for a year. There, he co-wrote a paper on advanced and nano-material regulation, conducted research on carbon sequestration and mitigating the effects of terrorism at State Department facilities abroad, and developed applications for producing optimizations of river dredging, among other projects.

On a typical day at RAND, DeSmet might be discussing the ethics of border control in the morning, hearing a speaker from the Cato Institute midday, studying economics in the afternoon and heading out for happy hour with coworkers at the end of the day.

Academics runs in the DeSmet family. His father Gary is a former teacher and former longtime school board member and his big sister, Sarah Gaschler, is currently a math teacher at SVHS.

Looking forward, DeSmet expects his longterm focus to be on renewable energy, but still making good use of his background in engineering.

He said that everything he learned in his master’s program convinced him that the failure of the U.S. and other countries to make significant progress in various solar technologies is more of a failure to implement, rather than a failure of technology. He hopes to use data science to help give policy makers the analysis they need to solve implementation issues.

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