Yomna ElSharony

Early in her career, Yomna ElSharony worked as a Water Resources Engineer and Hydrologist. For several years, she held multiple positions at top engineering consultancies in North Africa and the Middle East where she designed flood mitigation plans in UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. ElSharony also worked on integrative water resources management and modeling for international rivers and environmental impact assessment of dams. Later, informed by her experiences and her commitment to community organizing and human rights, ElSharony started her journey to be a social scientist. Before coming to Cornell, ElSharony earned two graduate degrees in International Relations from Cairo University, and in Water Management from IHE-Delft, the Netherlands, where she was awarded the best Master's Thesis Award for her work on the political economy and the environmental history of semi-arid lands and water in the Egyptian desert frontiers.

Currently, ElSharony is interested in temporalities of natural resources, philosophy of water sciences, environmental history of rivers, and broadly in critical development studies. 

ElSharony's research examines water infrastructure development in North-East Africa, focusing on how the maneuverable spaces and processes of hydraulic design, construction, and operation shape accesses and appropriations of water, alter the river's hydrology and (re)produce uneven and combined social metabolism with water in the Nile River Basin. 

• 2022: CALS Alumni Association Award, Cornell University
• 2021: Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Dissertation Proposal Development (DPD) Fellowship