Kassandra (Kassie) Grimes is a general engineer in the Building Technologies Office (BTO) of the U.S. Department of Energy. On the Commercial Buildings Integration team, Kassie is committed to energy efficiency and equitable electrification of buildings through place-based and community support initiatives in the Buildings Upgrade Prize. She also oversees research related to energy equity and environmental justice in commercial buildings and the commercial building workforce. Kassie previously supported BTO as an ORISE Science and Technology Policy Fellow.

Kassie completed a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Virginia as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in 2020. Her dissertation research focused on evaluating a sustainable wastewater treatment technology for the treatment of constituents that stimulate antibiotic resistance in bacteria in the environment. She holds a master's degree from the University of Virginia and a bachelor's from Rowan University, both in civil and environmental engineering. She was a 2019 Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where she worked on diversity and STEM education initiatives for the EngineerGirl program.

In January 2020, she was appointed to the Student, Post-Doctoral, and Early Career subcommittee of the President’s Council of Advisors in Science and Technology. She was also a 2020 selected fellow for the Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps program.