Christina L Stamos-Pfeiffer

Christina completed her bachelor’s degree in Geology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. After graduating, she supported petroleum geologists at Standard Oil of Ohio and British Petroleum in San Francisco. While a graduate student at San Diego State University, she worked as a micropaleontologist, did consulting work for her professors, and in 1987 became a student hydrologic technician for the USGS in the San Diego Projects Office. She completed her master’s degree in geology with an emphasis in groundwater hydrology in 1989 and started her decades-long career as a hydrologist for the USGS. During her USGS tenure, her studies and field work in California coastal and desert alluvial basins entailed designing and installing multiple-well monitoring wells, interpreting water-level and water-quality data, investigating complex regional hydrogeologic systems, quantifying groundwater budgets, and simulating groundwater flow. As a supervisory hydrologist for the Groundwater Availability and Use Assessments Program, her primary duties included developing cooperative studies and reviewing technically complex interpretive reports. She retired on December 30, 2023 but continues to mentor other hydrologists and physical scientists on innovative techniques to investigate and determine sources, age, and chemical character of groundwater. As a Hydrologist Emerita, she continues to collaborate with the groundwater-specialist team for the California Water Science Center, hydrologists from other USGS Water Science Centers across the nation, and the USGS Water Resources Mission Area.