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Ludmilla Aristilde
Keya Banerjee
Jamie deLemos
Francisco Donez
Alexander Eaton
Nicole Gross-Camp
Rita Hudetz
Karen Hyun
Sarah Johnson
Timothy Krupnik
Kelly Levin
Timothy Moore
Daniel Morris
Misha Mytar
Jessica Nelson
Alexis Racelis
Nithya Ramanathan
Emily Scott
Laura Senier
David Takacs
Laura Wisland
William Yandik
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Ludmilla is currently completing her doctoral degree in Molecular Toxicology with an emphasis in aquatic chemistry and toxicology at UC-Berkeley. Ludmilla’s long-standing interests in water pollution and environmental/human health issues stemmed from her experiences growing up in Haiti. Her interests had led her to work in other developing countries. In India, she worked on assessing the linkage between the use of urban wastewater for irrigation and its impacts on groundwater pollution and human health in several villages. She also participated in a short-term assignment in Peru to conduct on-site measurements of water quality parameters and collection of fishes and micro-invertebrates in an effort to evaluate the water quality and ecological health of tributaries to the Amazon River. Now, through her doctoral research, Ludmilla seeks to contribute to the environmental risk assessment of pharmaceuticals, which are important emerging water pollutants due to their extensive use in agriculture and human medicine and their continual discharge into our waters. She is investigating the interactions of fluoroquinolone antibiotics with metals and soil particles in our waters and their potential toxicity to organisms important to the ecological health of our aquatic habitats. Throughout her career, Ludmilla wants to continue to work at the interface of water quality and associated environmental and public health issues and contribute to the implementation of policies to help remediate these issues. She has particular interests in the fate and effects of the continual release of biologically-active compounds in our environment. Ludmilla holds a Bachelor of Science in Geological Sciences with a concentration in environmental chemistry from Cornell University and a Masters of Science in Environmental Engineering from UC-Berkeley.
Keya is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts) in energy and environmental policy. She plans to use her degree as preparation for a career in renewable energy advocacy. For her master’s thesis, Keya is researching the cultural, political, and economic factors that determine the relative success of alternative energy policies in different countries. Prior to beginning graduate school, she worked as an economic consultant, first at NERA Economic Consulting in White Plains, NY and later at Lexecon in Cambridge, MA. At Lexecon, Keya specialized in the energy industry, and became interested in clean energy when she helped advise the Nantucket Planning and Economic Development Commission on the Cape Wind proposal. At the Fletcher School, Keya is a Research Assistant for the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy where she is participating in two studies. The first involves developing strategies for increasing the use of distributed energy in New England; the second is a cross-country comparison of the drivers of carbon dioxide emissions. Aside from her research work, Keya is also the Co-President of the Environmental Sustainability Initiative, a student-run environmental organization at the Fletcher School. Outside of graduate school, Keya is a nature enthusiast and member of the Thoreau Society in Concord, MA. Keya holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Jamie completed her doctorate in environmental health at the School of Engineering where she was part of the innovative Water: Systems, Science and Society program at Tufts that encourages the use of interdisciplinary tools and perspectives to manage a variety of water resource issues. Her research focuses on the geochemical controls on uranium mobilization in waste burdened mining communities of the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. Because ingestion of soluble uranium results in renal toxicity, she is integrating field, laboratory, and GIS data to help identify high risk exposure areas that may be contributing to adverse human health impacts. This work is a community based participatory research (CBPR) collaboration with the University of New Mexico Community Environmental Health Program and Eastern Navajo Health Board.
Prior to her work at Tufts, Jamie earned a B.A. in geology from Skidmore College and an M.S. in Earth Science from Dartmouth College, where she studied the transport and geochemistry of naturally occurring arsenic from a former landfill in southeastern New Hampshire. In addition to her current work with the Navajo, Jamie remains passionate about issues of naturally occurring arsenic, particularly in private water supplies. She volunteers her time with students and communities regarding this prevalent environmental health concern at the local and international scale.
Jamie is thrilled to be a part of a CBPR effort, and upon completion of her doctorate, is looking forward to a continued partnership with the Navajo and a teaching position where she can encourage and educate students early in their research careers that participatory research can result in immediate, culturally appropriate solutions for communities dealing with environmental hazards.
Francisco Dóñez works for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Los Angeles as the Ports and Marine Sector Lead for the West Coast Collaborative, a partnership of leaders from government, the private sector, and environmental and community groups committed to reducing diesel emissions along the West Coast. He also coordinates EPA’s support of several environmental justice initiatives in southern California and the Central Valley, and assists with clean energy and climate change activities along the U.S.-Mexican border. Francisco is a Ph.D. candidate in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation research examines a controversy over haze pollution in Big Bend National Park in the 1990s, interpreting the science, politics, and activism surrounding this issue in terms of geographical space and scale. He is highly motivated to improve racial and ethnic diversity in environmental and academic communities, and has led equal opportunity initiatives within EPA. A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1991, and an M.S. in Public Policy from Georgia Tech in 1996.
Alex is the Executive Director of the International Renewable Resources Institute (IRRI-Mexico) in Mexico City, an excellent platform for his research as a Master’s of Science candidate in the Environmental Systems Program at HSU. His research examines the design, dissemination, and social acceptance of anaerobic digestion systems that process organic waste and produce energy for household and community use. Alex is exploring the potential to fund small and medium scale renewable energy systems, with a focus on anaerobic biogas digesters, through emerging carbon markets. Alex received a B.A. in Community Journalism and Environmental Studies from the Western State College of Colorado where he founded the Renewable Energy Fund, a student driven funding mechanism for clean energy technology on the Gunnison, Colorado campus. Prior to moving to Mexico his motivation to work on socially integrated renewable energy was developed during project work in Alaska, Russia, and Nicaragua.
Nicole is a tropical ecologist and conservation biologist specialising in the African tropics. She joined the University of East Anglia (Overseas Development Group) in March 2009 as part of a team to evaluate a Payments for Environmental Services (PES) scheme in the Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda.
Nicole began her involvement in African conservation issues in 1996 working as a botanical research assistant in the Ituri Forest of the DRC. Additional professional highlights include management of a primate sanctuary in Nigeria, and most recently helping to design and implement a chimpanzee population census in Rwanda.
Nicole\'s work to support tropical conservation and ecology extends to the US where she served as the Assistant Director for the Center for Tropical Ecology & Conservation for two years (www.centerfortropicalecology.org).
She joined the PES Rwanda team eager to apply her interdisciplinary training in a way that will meaningfully contribute to bridging the gap between conservation and poverty alleviation initiatives.
Rita M. Hudetz is pursuing joint master’s degrees in Business Administration and Environmental Management with a focus in international chemicals governance and business strategy at Yale University. She received her bachelor degree from Loyola University Chicago with honors in International Studies and Communications. Before commencing her graduate studies, she co-founded an environmental health nonprofit focused on agrochemical exposure issues in Illinois, conducted marketing research for Fortune 500 companies, and worked as a freelance market researcher and intern for the green media and marketing firm Ideal Bite. During her first year at Yale, she worked as an intern at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where she learned about rapidly evolving international chemical agreements and began to develop an expertise in how international agreements impacted multinational corporations. Furthermore, Rita conducted independent research on international chemical risk governance and management strategies. She currently works as an intern at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research in Geneva, where she is investigating private sector interest in capacity building within developing countries to implement chemical agreements. During the school year, Rita is also a research assistant at the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale.
Karen Hyun has a Ph.D. from the Marine Affairs Program at the University of Rhode Island. Her dissertation work was on ecosystem-based management of the Colorado River Delta. The entire flow of the Colorado River gets stored or diverted for mainly agricultural, municipal, and industrial uses and no longer reaches the Gulf of California. The ecosystems of the Delta that remain are sustained by canal leakages and agricultural runoff. These accidentally created ecosystems are further threatened by growing populations in the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico and by climate change. However, Karen analyzed solutions that lie in better governance of Colorado River water, with particular attention toward creating policies and making societal choices to conserve and restore the Delta. In addition to her dissertation research, Karen worked with the Research Coordination Network for the Colorado River Delta to restore estuarine conditions on a small-scale by using a mix of agricultural runoff and seawater. She also volunteered with the Sonoran Institute, a non-governmental organization promoting community-based environmental stewardship, restoring habitat by growing and planting native trees, promoting and educating others about restoration activities and engaging with local community
members. She hopes to pursue an academic research and teaching
position, while contributing to the grassroots efforts in the Delta and maintaining the invaluable friendships that have been built across the border. However, before returning to academia, she has a fellowship working on ocean policy on Capitol Hill.
Sarah is pursuing a doctorate in planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since leaving her home in Central Kentucky, her environmental work has taken her to the far corners of the globe. She has quantified rainforest biomass in Costa
Rica, studied the paleohydrology of a fragile alpine lake on Mauna Kea, investigated ancient DNA at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, explored the preservation of biosignatures in Western Australia’s acid salt lakes, conducted rapid biodiversity surveys in Madagascar, and probed for traces of life in Antarctica. Through this research, Sarah has developed a passion for discovery and exploration, and her work at MIT has taken this passion even further: she currently studies the evolution of planetary atmospheres,
especially the role of sulfur volatiles as a cause of global warming on early Mars.
In addition to her research, Sarah reports on the U.N.\'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change negotiations through her work with the International Institute for Sustainable Development and volunteers for Common Hope for Health, a small NGO providing health services in Kenya. She has also served as a member of NASA’s Mars
Exploration Rover Science Team. None of these experiences would make any sense to her, however, if not for her creative essays, which take up more of her time than she prefers to admit to her advisors. Sarah holds undergraduate degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and Oxford University, and an M.Sc. in biology from Oxford University.
Timothy J. Krupnik is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His research is on the socio-ecological dimensions of low-input rice production systems in the Senegal River Valley where he collaborates with the Africa Rice Center and the Food and Agriculture Organizations’ Farmer Field School Program. In the last 30 years, rice consumption in West Africa has grown faster than any other grain. This expanding demand has been accompanied by the adoption of chemical intensive and unsustainable farming practices that have important ecological and social ramifications. Responding to these problems, Tim's research focuses on evaluating if alternative cropping systems can improve farmers' livelihoods while reducing negative environmental impacts and conserving resources. His interests include resource use efficiency, agroecosystem resiliency and socioeconomic trade-offs between low-input compared to conventional cropping systems. Methodologically, Tim's work also employs economic modeling and emphasizes farmer participation in the design and assessment of experimental treatments.
Prior to his Doctoral studies, Tim completed an M.S. in International Agricultural Development at the University of California, Davis where he researched nitrogen use efficiency completed a thesis in Kenya on farmers' perceptions and management of soils as related to watershed management. He has visited 15 countries in Africa, and has worked on sustainable agricultural projects in Ethiopia, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Haiti. In the US, he has been the founder of several community based ecological education projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. When not working on his research, Tim enjoys ocean kayaking, teaching beekeeping, eating honey and riding bikes.
Kelly is an associate at the World Resources Institute, where she is devoting her work to international climate change policy. With the support of the Switzer Foundation, she pursued her doctoral degree at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Her research was dedicated to enhancing the policy response to the problem of climate impacts to biodiversity. Kelly was examining the current disconnect between scientific knowledge and adaptation policies in an effort to recommend prescriptions to overcome hurdles in advancing biodiversity conservation in a changing climate. Kelly has also worked as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, covering the UN climate change and biodiversity negotiations, and at NESCAUM (Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management), where she spent her time developing a greenhouse gas registry for the Northeast. Kelly holds a B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale College and Master of Environmental Management from Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Timothy Moore is an MS Architecture student in the Building Science program at UC Berkeley. His focus is on improving the effectiveness and energy efficiency of buildings as a means to curbing resource consumption and associated emissions while providing more habitable indoor environments. He is currently researching, simulating, and testing hydronic radiant cooling for commercial buildings at the UC Berkeley Center for the Built Environment. His thesis project puts this research in the context of climate-related design optimization strategies. Collectively, this work will result in design and simulation guidelines intended to accelerate the appropriate and effective adoption of exceptionally low-energy approaches to providing high-quality indoor environments.
Prior to attending Berkeley, Timothy founded Whole Systems Design through which he provided energy modeling and sustainable design consulting to architects, engineers, and other consulting firms. He is also a co-founder and former VP of Customer & Technology Solutions for Hypercar, Inc. (now Fiberforge), and was a Senior Research Associate at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) for five years before that. He was the principle systems integrator for RMI\'s Hypercar concept, led product development for Hypercar Inc. at Lotus Engineering (Norwich, England) and design integration at TWR Engineering (Oxford, England). Before RMI, he served on a volunteer regional urban design assistance team and provided design services to a successful start-up developing equipment to reclaim contaminated oil-based fluids, thus preventing their inappropriate disposal and associated environmental degradation. He earned his BS in Environmental Design at Western Washington University where he designed and built ultralight, low-drag, hybrid-electric vehicles, led the solar race team to victory in the California Clean Air Race, and received awards for outstanding scholarship in environmental sciences, energy systems, vehicle design, and sustainable architecture from the Huxley College for the Environment, the Society of Automotive Engineers, and U.S. Department of Energy. Prior to college he was an environmental education intern at the Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center in northern Minnesota. Timothy has published papers and articles on radiant cooling applications for commercial buildings, integrated whole-system design for energy-efficient automobiles, sustainable architecture, and renewable energy systems, and is the author of the USGBC Colorado Chapter\'s nationally distributed LEED Professional Accreditation Study Guide.
Daniel Morris is a Research Associate for the Climate Policy Program at Resources for the Future. As part of RFF’s climate program, his work focuses on a suite of climate change issues, including domestic adaptation policy, monitoring and modeling forest carbon, GHG emissions trading system design, climate impacts related to recreation, ecosystem services, and current climate legislation. He also manages the environmental economics blog Common Tragedies and contributes to the climate policy blog Weathervane. Along with being a Switzer Fellow, he is also an Environmental Leadership Program Senior Fellow. In Daniel's fellowship year, he was a Master’s student at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, where he investigated the challenges of adapting industrialized societies to unavoidable climate change as well as the multiple environmental justice implications that accompany adaptation practices. Additionally, he managed a year-long group research project investigating the environmental and economic benefits specifically related to stormwater runoff attenuation resulting from the installation of vegetated rooftops throughout the Los Angeles River watershed. Daniel has experience in both government agencies and non-profit organizations. In 2007, he worked in the Policy Analysis office of the USDA Forest Service, where he advised Forest Service leaders on issues ranging from carbon sequestration in forests to the role of risk and uncertainty in forest management. Before that, he worked in the Park Grants and Strategic Alliances division of the National Park Foundation. Prior to his graduate work, Daniel graduated from Northern Arizona University in 2005 with a degree in Environmental Science with an emphasis in Communication and Rhetoric.
Misha received a master’s degree in Community Planning and Development at the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine. Her studies explored how unplanned and rapid development affects environments, economies and quality of life.
Misha studied anthropology at Yale University before returning home to Maine. Since then, she has worked in forest research, community organizing, sustainable tourism, land conservation and environmental planning. Most recently she has been working to plan for municipal greenhouse gas reductions, a wildlife corridor involving multiple towns and conservation organizations, and the protection and promotion of scenic resources in Downeast Maine.
Her goal is to help municipalities plan for sustainable development and conservation organizations coordinate with local development objectives. She hopes that by integrating environmental science with land use planning and policy she can help reconcile growth and conservation in her home state of Maine and beyond.
Jessica is a doctoral student in environmental health sciences at the BU School of Public Health. She found her way to public health through environmental advocacy and the realization that talking about health is a good way to engage people in environmental issues. Her commitment to the field is rooted in the desire to make our society healthier and more environmentally sustainable and to improve social and environmental justice. In the future, Jessica plans to work as an environmental epidemiologist with a government agency or non-profit organization. She hopes to help establish and implement environmental health surveillance programs that use the information collected to prevent environmental contamination and harm to human health.
After graduating from Carleton College with a B.A., Jessica worked for a number of years for environmental non-profits in Minnesota, including the international coalition Health Care Without Harm. Her doctoral research centers on biomonitoring, the practice of measuring chemicals in peoples’ bodies and an important tool for environmental health surveillance. Her work is interdisciplinary, and uses quantitative and qualitative research methods to study its scientific applications as well as its social implications. Jessica was the coordinator of the 2006 Boston Consensus Conference on Biomonitoring, an effort that brought together 14 Boston-area lay people to gather their input on the complicated ethical and political questions associated with the technology.
After receiving his undergraduate degree in biology from UC Santa Barbara in 1998, Alex worked for a few years with the US Department of Agriculture in Fort Lauderdale, Florida researching aspects of biological control of invasive plants. After a stint at the USDA-Australian Biological Control Laboratory in Brisbane, Alex returned to Florida to complete his master’s degree, where he studied Mayan agroforestry in southeastern Mexico. His doctoral studies was in the department of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where his research focused on developing an interdisciplinary framework with which to examine the sustainability of the harvest of polewood from common property forests in the Maya region of the Quintana Roo, Mexico. The local polewood trade in the region has grown precipitously in recent years to meet the demand for rustic construction materials along the coastal tourism corridor. Alex analyzed the socio-economic and ecological tradeoffs of the harvest of polewood by researching the effects of polewood exploitation on forest diversity and structure as well as its social impacts and implications regarding local governance. Alex believes that only by combining social, economic, and ecological aspects of environmental problems and framing them in their appropriate political context can scientists effectively provide more appropriate management recommendations. Currently, Alex is a postdoctoral fellow with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service in S. Texas, examining management options of bi-nationally invasive species--weeds that are having tremendous environmental and social impact in both Mexico and the US, especially along the border.
Nithya envisions a not-too-distant future where collecting environmental data from any source will be cheap, ubiquitous, accurate, and readily available to everyone. She aims to achieve this reality by using her expertise as a computer scientist to design technology specifically for environmental applications and to serve as a bridge between those who design technology (computer scientists) and those who use it (environmental scientists).
Nithya has focused on the design and application of wireless sensing technology to study soil and groundwater systems. For one of her thesis projects, she initiated a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort between three major universities to apply this technology to better understand the large-scale public health disaster of arsenic contamination in Bangladesh's groundwater. With funds obtained from the NSF, she led the technical design and implementation of this project. The sensor data collected from this system have already led to novel, unexpected findings which have spawned new areas of research. As a result of the project's success, Nithya was invited to and subsequently co-authored an EPA white paper on the application of distributed wireless sensing to the study of water quality.
As one of the rare computer scientists who actually enjoys being knee-high in mud when solving technical problems, Nithya hopes to bring a unique perspective to the design of technology for environmental applications.
Emily Scott is an interdisciplinary artist, organizer, and educator. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Art History at UCLA, developing a dissertation on landscape-based art from the 1960s and early 1970s. She is also a Teaching Fellow for the UCLA Institute of the Environment, for which she has designed an undergraduate seminar on contemporary art that engages environment-related sciences and politics. Both within and outside of academia, her work explores intersections between art and the environment. She believes artists, as creative cultural producers, have the potential to make crucial contributions to environmental problem solving by raising public awareness and facilitating dialogue, often by elucidating complex information and questions across traditional divides. In 2004, she founded the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, a collective comprised of local artists, geographers, art historians, environmental scientists, and architects that offers public programming in and about Los Angeles and its everyday urban ecologies. Their project Interstate Road Trip Specialist Field Kit, Public Programs and Billboard was just named one of the most innovative public artworks of 2006 by the Americans for the Arts\' Public Art Network.
Laura Senier holds a PhD in sociology from Brown University and an MPH in epidemiology and social and behavioral science from the Boston University School of Public Health. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with appointments in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology and the Department of Family Medicine.
Laura's research is at the intersection of health and the environment. Her dissertation explores the impact of scientific research on gene-environment interactions on public health policy and practice.
While at Brown, Laura worked with the Brown University Superfund Basic Research Program providing technical assistance and leadership development training to environmental justice communities throughout Rhode Island that are struggling with environmental contamination.
Laura is also involved in an ongoing collaboration with colleagues at the Boston University School of Public Health to explore how communities perceive health studies that are done to examine the health impacts of toxic contamination. She also works with a team at the Rutgers University Center for State Health Policy to examine health beliefs and behaviors among residents of assisted living communities. Her work has appeared in Science, Technology, and Human Values, Sociological Inquiry, Organization and Environment, Social Science and Medicine, and Environmental Science and Technology.
In 2008, David completed a joint J.D./LL.M. program with the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He has most recently been a consultant for Conservation International, writing a comprehensive report on Forest Carbon and Climate Change. As a law student, David clerked at the International Environmental Law Research Centre in Geneva, Earthjustice’s International Program, and the Center for Biological Diversity. He was co-chair of the Hastings-to-Haiti Partnership, working with aspiring lawyers in Jeremie, Haiti. David was a Peace Corps forestry volunteer in Senegal, a faculty member at CSU Monterey Bay’s Earth Systems Science and Policy program, and has a B.S. in Biology and Ph.D in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University.
Laura is a an energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Berkeley, California. Current projects are focused on implementation of the state\'s Renewable Porfolio Standard goals and policy design associated with AB 32. Laura graduated with a Master\'s of Public Policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy in May 2008. At GSPP, Laura focused on western energy and water policies. Specifically, she directed her work toward helping states address climate change and protect freshwater ecosystems while meeting energy, water supply, and flood management needs. She has worked with the Sonoma County Water Agency, the renewable energy division of the California Public Utilities Commission, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company.
Before graduate school, Laura was the Director of the California Hydropower Reform Coalition. CHRC is an association of river conservation and recreation organizations that work to restore California rivers by improving the operation of hydropower dams. The heart of Laura\'s work at CHRC was working with dam owners to return water to its natural channel, enhance fish and wildlife habitat, and improve water quality.
Laura earned her B.A. in environmental public policy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she completed a thesis on the creation of financial incentives to promote land conservation in Mexico.
Will is interested in translating environmental research to the parties best equipped to use such knowledge – be they policymakers, landowners, or the general public. With a professional background in both field ecology and journalism, Will is interested in how the media presents science to the public. He currently serves as outreach director for the Hubbard Brook Science Links Carbon Project, which aims to inform county-level decision makers how to improve carbon management at local scales. He has earned separate undergraduate degrees in English (Princeton) and Biology (University of Wisconsin), a Masters in Environmental Studies (Brown), and works as a freelance writer for a variety of national magazines and newspapers.
