Nick Rong, M.Sc., P.Geo.
Nick is a Project Scientist in the water resources group at Knight Piésold in Vancouver, BC, and a registered Professional Geoscientist in British Columbia. He specializes in hydrometeorology assessments for mining and hydroelectric projects, combining advanced statistical methods with rainfall-runoff modelling, and he leads Knight Piésold’s climate change assessment practice, where global climate model projections are translated into water management and engineering design.
His work spans British Columbia, Yukon, Ontario, California, and South America, and covers every phase of a project from pre-feasibility through permitting to operational compliance monitoring. He has served as project manager and as climate, hydrology, and climate change discipline lead on mine developments, with work ranging from baseline monitoring network design to flood frequency analysis, watershed modelling, water balance integration, and probabilistic dam breach analysis. On the power side he has worked on long-term streamflow synthesis for generation estimation, watershed modelling, extreme rainfall analysis, and hydrometeorology for dam removal.
Nick holds an M.Sc. in Hydrology from the University of British Columbia (2017), completed under Dr. Younes Alila, P.Eng., and a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Environmental Science from Simon Fraser University (2014) with a specialization in Water Science. His graduate research examined the environmental controls on rain-on-snow floods in the Pacific Northwest, specifically how forest harvesting and road building alter large peak flows in small headwater catchments. That work was published in Advances in Water Resources as Stochastic hydrology reveals the controls of forest harvesting – peakflow causal relations in snow-transient environment (Rong, Bishop and Alila, 2026). Before UBC he was a research assistant at SFU in the Soil Science Lab and the Climate Research Lab. He began doctoral studies in the same UBC lab in 2017 and left in 2019 to work in industry.
At UBC he was Senior Teaching Assistant for FRST 385 / FOPR 388 (Introduction to Forest Hydrology / Methods in Forest Hydrology) and a Graduate TA for APBI 200 (Introduction to Soil Science) and FRST 231 (Introduction to Biometrics). He also volunteered as a TA for FRST 590/591, Dr. Alila’s graduate course in advanced stochastic hydrology.
