For more information on the Doris Duke Conservation Fellowships, please return to the Doris Duke Conservation Fellows Page.

Susan Bryan studied at Vassar and Cornell during her undergraduate years, majoring in Cultural Anthropology and Asian Studies, concentrating on Japan. Since then she has worked at the Embassy of Japan in Washington DC, and then for a private Landscape Architecture firm which focused on upscale residential design. Currently, Susan is in her third year of study at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan where she is studying Landscape Architecture, a professional degree, with a focus on wetland restoration and ecological restoration.

Allen Hance
Resource Policy & Behavior

Allen Hance currently works as a policy analyst for the Northeast-Midwest Institute (NEMW). NEMW is a Washington-based, nonprofit, and nonpartisan research organization that develops policy, evaluates federal and state programs, and disseminates information about sound economic and environmental technologies and practices. Allen's work at NEMW focuses on environmental policy and legislative activity related to the Upper Mississippi, Delaware, Potomac, and Susquehanna river basins. Before coming to NEMW, Allen worked in Representative Ron Kind's office (D-WI), where as a Sea Grant Fellow he coordinated the activities of the 18-member bipartisan Upper Mississippi River Congressional Task Force. After receiving his BA in philosophy from Dartmouth College, Allen worked for a political campaign manager in San Francisco on a series of statewide and congressional races. He attended graduate school at Boston College and was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Tuebingen in (West) Germany. Earning his PhD in philosophy in 1990, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois (Urbana), where he researched and taught in several fields, including environmental ethics and ethics and public policy. A desire to work more directly on public policy issues connected with water resources led Allen back to graduate school at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE). As a Doris Duke Charitable Environmental and Natural Resources Fellow, Allen pursued coursework both in environmental policy and in the natural sciences related to watershed management. He worked in the summer of 1999 as an intern with the Michigan chapter of The Nature Conservancy, developing a geographical information system that identified and classified remnants of lakeplain prairie in southeastern Michigan. His Master's project, "Recent Trends in Ecosystem Management," conducted with three other SNRE graduate students under the direction of Professor Steven Yaffee, assessed the institutional innovations and ecological outcomes at approximately 100 ecosystem management projects across the United States. Allen received his MS in environmental policy in April 2000.

Bryce attended the University of Southern California where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies and Economics. Upon completion of his studies he was employed by Klasky Csupo Productions in Hollywood, California as the educational consultant on the children's television series The Wild Thornberry's. He also dedicated a significant amount of time as a volunteer coordinator with the educational and outreach staff at Heal the Bay, a nonprofit organization set up to monitor coastal water quality in southern California. In the fall of 1998 Bryce began work on his master's degree at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan with a specialization in environmental behavior and education. While at Michigan, Bryce took the opportunity to gain greater expertise in the educational field serving as both a graduate student instructor and environmental educator at a youth camp. In May of 2000 Bryce was honored for his work as an educator when the undergraduate students of the School of Natural Resources and Environment selected him as the Graduate Student Instructor of the Year for 1999-2000. Bryce recently completed the requirements for his degree with the submission of a project titled Health Risk Communication and Perception: A Case Study of Pesticide Residues on Food. Utilizing the brochure Pesticides and Food, a publication of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, he and his co-authors sought to better understand the role of informational campaigns in advancing environmental literacy among various segments of the population, particularly at-risk groups and underrepresented minorities.

Sarah McKearnan received her undergraduate degree in government from Harvard University. She has spent eight years working as a professional facilitator and trainer in the environmental field. She is currently a research associate at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources & Environment focusing on eco-regional planning and decision making for recovery of the Pacific salmon, working with Seattle's endangered species recovery team. Simultaneously, she is completing a dual master's degree program in the Schools of Natural Resources and Environment and Public Policy. Before returning to graduate school, Sarah was a Senior Associate at Consensus Building Institute, a non-profit organization in Massachusetts that provides mediation and facilitation services to public agencies, non-profit organizations and industries in the United States and abroad. While at CBI, Sarah facilitated multi-party dialogues on land use, facility siting and other environmental and public policy issues. She served on the faculty of the International Programme on the Management of Sustainability, and coordinated the design of programs to train the staffs of public agencies and non-profits in consensus-building skills. She was the editor of Consensus magazine for four years; and is co-author (with Lawrence Susskind and Jennifer Thomas-Larmer) of the Consensus Building Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Reaching Agreement (Sage Publications, 1999).

Cassie O'Connor is in a four-year joint degree program, pursuing an MS in Resource Ecology & Management at SNRE and a JD at the Law School. A biological anthropology major in college (BA Harvard University 1995), most of Cassie's environmental experience stems from field work in wildlife biology and ecology. She has studied killer whales in British Columbia, wild dogs in Botswana, and orangutans in Indonesia. In addition, she was a teaching assistant at the Harvard University Extension School for classes in rainforest ecology and conservation. Prior to graduate school, Cassie lived for a year in West Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), working on a community forestry project. This experience in an integrated conservation and development project impressed upon her the need to combine scientific research and knowledge with management and policy decisions. While basic science is essential, facility with law and policy is also invaluable to guide conservation projects from development into implementation.

Shari Ortez is a Master's student in Resource and Ecology Management at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Her thesis research addresses the relationships between land use, invasive plant growth, and bird community characteristics of small wetlands in the Huron River watershed in southeastern Michigan. Shari is working in conjunction with the Huron River Watershed Council (HRWC) in Ann Arbor, MI. She was an intern at HRWC for two consecutive summers, once funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and once by the Edna Bailey Sussman Fund. She assisted with creating a bioreserve map in a Geographic Information System (GIS) using recent aerial photos and local expert knowledge, and collecting species accounts within the watershed for a biodiversity assessment. In addition to her work with the HRWC, Shari has taught classes in Introductory Biology and Global Climate Change. Shari also earned her Bachelor's degree at the School of Natural Resources and Environment. Her solid academic background in ecology and natural resource management has been further strengthened by the work she has pursued. Shari was a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras in the Natural Resources sector where she worked with a small NGO that was trying to restore local watersheds. Shari gained experience in watershed management, environmental education and learned the inner workings of an NGO. Shari sees her career goals fitting in best in the governmental or NGO sector.

Elisabeth Witt (MS candidate in Resource Ecology and Management) entered SNRE with a BS in biology from St. Norbert College in DePere, Wisconsin. During her undergraduate career she assisted in teaching classes in ecology and was employed by Wisconsin's Environmental Decade, a small nonprofit environmental organization that fought to keep Exxon from opening a sulfide mine near the headwaters of the Wolf River. She also conducted a research experiment on the foraging success of leaf-cutter ants in the Nusagandi Reserve in Panama and presented her findings to several state and regional conferences. Her interest in tropical ecology brought her to the University of Michigan, where she now works with Dr. Ivette Perfecto. Over the past two years she has been conducting her thesis research on an organic shaded coffee farm in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. Her thesis research focuses on the dispersal of tropical tree seeds by small mammals in fragmented forests. Because of hunting pressures in these forest fragments, many of the original large seed dispersers/predators are absent from the ecosystem she studies. Elisabeth's research brings to light the role certain small mammals are playing in seed dispersal and their ability to disperse seeds into disturbed habitat (neighboring coffee farms). After graduation, Elisabeth hopes to continue researching tropical ecology in a PhD program. Her continuing goal is to work in an organization or institution that uses field research to support positive political change, policy development, and the conservation of forests and traditional agricultural systems.