SEAS Faculty

Arun Agrawal

Samuel Trask Dana Professor

Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy and Planning

Arun Agrawal, PhD, emphasizes the politics of international development, institutional change, and environmental conservation in his research and teaching. He has written critically on indigenous knowledge, community-based conservation, common property, population resources, and environmental identities. Agrawal is the coordinator for the International Forestry Resources and Institutions network and is currently carrying out research in central and east Africa as well as South Asia. Since 2013, Agrawal has served as the editor-in-chief of World Development and his recent work has appeared in Science, PNAS, Conservation Biology, Development and Change, among other journals. Preceding his work at U-M, Agrawal was educated at Duke University, the Indian Institute of Management, and Delhi University and has held teaching and research positions at Yale, Florida, McGill, Berkeley, and Harvard among other universities. 

Karen Alofs

Assistant Professor

Conservation Ecology

Assistant Professor Alofs studies how ecological concepts can be used to address conservation concerns in freshwater environments. Her recent work, as a postdoctoral fellow with the National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship Program, focused on the impacts of climate-facilitated range expansions on lake fish communities. In addition to climate change, she is interested in understanding the effects of environmental stressors including invasive species, habitat fragmentation and habitat degradation on biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability.

Alofs research is framed by three ecological questions: How are ecological communities changing across spatial scales and over time? What are the impacts of species interactions versus environmental factors on community structure, population persistence and invasion? And can we make general ecological predictions (e.g. predictions relevant in terrestrial and aquatic or temperate and tropical communities)? Moreover, she is interested in how ecological studies can contribute to the conservation of aquatic ecosystems and the sustainable management of fisheries.

Dima Beletsky

Research Scientist

Conservation Ecology

Dima Beletsky, PhD, has been with the SEAS Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR), a joint Institute between the University of Michigan and NOAA, since 1995. His research expertise lies in the hydrodynamics of lakes and coupling lake physics with biological processes. Since the beginning of his career in limnology in Russia, he has worked on hydrodynamics and climatology of several large lakes in Europe (Ladoga and Onega), North America (Lake Champlain, Lake St. Clair, Lakes Michigan, Erie, Ontario and Huron), and the Baltic Sea. 

Rosina Bierbaum

Professor

Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems

Professor Bierbaum, PhD, focuses her research on the interface of science and policy--principally on issues related to climate change adaptation and mitigation at the national and international levels.  From 2001-2011, she served as Dean of SNRE and oversaw the creation of a new undergraduate program in the environment as well as five dual Master’s degrees across campus. She is the Chair of the Science and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility. She served on President Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST), as an Adaptation Fellow at the World Bank, led the Adaptation Chapter for the Congressionally-mandated U.S. National Climate assessment, and was a review editor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She has served in both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. Government--as the Senate-confirmed director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Environment Division, and in multiple capacities at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.

Allen Burton

Professor

Conservation Ecology

Allen Burton, PhD, is a Professor at SEAS and the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences. He has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Roskilde (Denmark), is a Concurrent Professor at Nanjing University, and an Honorary Professor at the State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment in Beijing China.

His research on ecological risk assessment, sediment quality criteria, and aquatic ecosystem stressors has taken him to all seven continents with Visiting Scientist positions in New Zealand, Italy, Denmark and Portugal.  His research focuses on sediment and stormwater contaminants and understanding bioavailability processes, effects and ecological risk at multiple trophic levels, and ranking stressor importance in human dominated watersheds.  He has received over ten million dollars in extramural research funding. 

He is a Fellow of the international Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC) and was a Distinguished Faculty Fellow of the Graham Sustainability Institute.  He served as Director of the University of Michigan Water Center and also the Cooperative Institute of Limnology and Ecosystems Research.  He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry, past president of SETAC, and served on numerous national and international panels and Advisory Boards with over 200 peer-reviewed publications on aquatic ecosystem risk issues. 

Victoria Campbell-Arvai

Assistant Research Scientist

Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Policy and Planning

Victoria Campbell-Arvai, PhD, serves as an Assistant Research Scientist at SEAS. Her research uses field and laboratory experiments as well as interviews and focus groups in her research to understand the roles of knowledge, values, attitudes and beliefs as drivers of direct and indirect pro-environmental behaviors.  She also works on individual and community engagement with environmental issues more broadly.  Because positive environmental attitudes do not always lead to pro-environmental behaviors, she is additionally interested in the role of information provision and behavioral interventions to motivate and support behaviors that lead to positive environmental outcomes.

Campbell-Arvai's other research interests include the factors that influence the acceptability of behavioral interventions in a broad variety of pro-social and pro-environmental contexts; perceptions of the value of reconstructed and restored habitats; student engagement around environmental sustainability; and information provision and other interventions to improve efficacy, motivation and perceptions of control related to engagement with and knowledge of environmental issues.

The particular contexts that she works in include food, water, and energy systems urban biodiversity, and habitat management and conservation.  

Bill Currie

Professor

Conservation Ecology, Environmental Informatics

Bill Currie, PhD, is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the environment and the development of sustainability science. His research and scholarly interests include ecosystem ecology, biogeochemistry including carbon and nutrient cycling, physics and energetics, landscapes and coupled human-natural systems, land conservation and management, biofuels and food security, computational modeling and simulation, synthesis using models, and philosophical foundations of modeling.

Currie has a background in ecosystem ecology, biogeochemistry (nutrient and carbon cycling), energetics, systems dynamics modeling and individual-based / agent-based modeling. He is interested in using our current understanding in these fields to investigate ecosystem change and dynamics in coupled human-environment systems.

Currie studies the linkages among carbon, nutrient, and water cycling and energy flows and transformations in terrestrial ecosystems and human-environment systems.  He is interested in using our current understanding of ecosystems to explore creative, new understanding of the two-way interactions in human-environment systems.  He works at scales from field plots to landscapes, collaborating with other researchers and students to integrate understanding and build models for synthesis.  The goal of this research is to contribute to the developing field of sustainability science using an approach that grows out of ecosystem science. 

James Diana

Professor; Director of Michigan Sea Grant

Conservation Ecology, Sustainable Systems

Jim Diana is a Professor of Fisheries and Aquaculture, as well as Director of the Michigan Sea Grant Program, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. His research focuses on aquatic animals and their interactions with the environment. This is expressed in two major research areas: sustainable aquaculture and its role in feeding the world, and the ecology of natural fish populations, particularly in the Great Lakes region. As aquaculture is the dominant means of producing seafood today, its environmental impacts are important, and we need to understand and remediate them in order to more sustainably produce aquaculture crops. Jim’s research focuses on the interaction between aquaculture practices and environmental impacts and seeks to find solutions for more sustainable production in the future. Secondly, human impacts on natural systems have resulted in dramatic declines in many fish species throughout the world, particularly in the Great Lakes region. His research focus in fish ecology is on the management, restoration, and rehabilitation of wild populations inevitably influenced by human disturbance. Jim’s teaching is in Aquatic Sciences, in particular, courses in Ecology and Biology of Fishes and Sustainable Aquaculture. In addition, he supervises research of a large number of graduate students in Aquatic Sciences.

Paige Fischer

Assistant Professor

Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Policy and Planning

Paige Fischer, PhD, serves as an Assistant Professor at SEAS. Fischer's research group focuses on human dimensions of environmental change. The primary goal of her research is to increase scientific understanding of human behavior as it relates to the sustainability of socio-ecological systems. She also investigates factors that enable and constrain human adaptation to environmental change including natural hazards and climate-related changes.

Fischer is particularly interested in understanding the capacity of individuals (e.g., private landowners) and organizations (e.g., natural resource agencies and environmental organizations) to adapt to environmental change through individual and collective natural resource management and environmental conservation actions. She draws on theories from the fields of natural resource sociology and human geography in my work. Her methods include qualitative interview analysis, quantitative survey analysis and social network analysis. She collaborates with researchers from diverse disciplines using a broad range of analytical approaches and strive to address problems of concern to local practitioners.

Bob Grese

Professor; Theodore Roosevelt Chair of Ecosystem Management; Director, Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum

Behavior, Education and Communication, Conservation Ecology, Landscape Architecture

Bob Grese serves as Director of the Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum. His teaching and research involve ecologically-based landscape design and management that respects the cultural and natural history of a region. Grese is particularly interested in the restoration and on-going management of urban wilds and the role such lands can play in re-connecting children and families with nature. He has long been fascinated by the work of early designers such as Jens Jensen and Ossian Cole Simonds who borrowed from the native landscape in their work, as there is much to be learned about their designs and their fate over time. He has a growing interest in green roofs and other low impact design strategies.

Rebecca D. Hardin

Associate Professor

Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Justice

Professor Hardin’s areas of interest and scientific study include human/wildlife interactions, and social and environmental change related to wildlife management, tourism, logging, and mining in equatorial Africa, especially the western Congo basin. Recent projects also focus on the increasingly intertwined practices of health, environmental management, and corporate governance in southern and eastern Africa, including sites in South Africa and Kenya. In 2013-14 she advised a student team studying environmental justice cases within the U.S., and connecting them to the international Environmental Justice Atlas. In 2014–15 she advised a student team assessing groundwater and surface water resources across the African continent, and advising GETF about how to make a better business case for water related investment by businesses in Africa. She teaches and mentors students interested in international environmental practice and policy, wildife management, human relationships to landscape, environmental justice, and global health. She also provides support for the students who are the genius behind SEAS's weekly environmental talk and music show, It’s Hot in Here, airing at noon on Fridays on WCBN FM 88.3, and with an accompanying blog and mp3 archive. The show helps researchers discuss their work with local audiences interested in environmental policy affecting Michigan, and also reach out to national and transnational audiences streaming the show via the Internet. Her recent book Transforming Ethnographic Knowledge explores the discipline of anthropology as a set of skills and tools for social change in sectors as different as business, biological conservation, conflict resolution, and biomedical care. Rebecca teaches courses in both SEAS and the Department of Anthropology, she also founded and coordinates SEAS's Environmental Justice Certificate Program for students beyond those two units working in or studying communities who are either negatively impacted by environmental harms, or experiencing inequality of access to environmental goods and ecosystem services.  Rebecca currently coordinates the Environmental Justice field of study and coordinates the Michigan Sustainability Cases initiative.

Inés Ibáñez

Associate Professor

Conservation Ecology

Associate Professor Ibáñez's major research interests focus on the current challenges that plant communities are facing in the context of global change, i.e. climate change, invasive species, and landscape fragmentation. These challenges are interconnected as they form the novel environment under which plants are growing. The fact that forest communities are highly dependent on recruitment dynamics makes the study of early demographic stages critical for understanding the impact of global change on the natural ecosystems around us. To isolate these phenomena, Ibáñez directs her research at the recruitment of dominant tree species, from seed production to the sapling stage, including seed dispersal, germination, establishment and survival during the first years. Results obtained from this line of research are essential to forecast reliable vegetation changes under future climate scenarios.

Meha Jain

Assistant Professor

Environmental Informatics, Environmental Justice

Assistant Professor Jain's research examines the impacts of environmental change on agricultural production, and strategies that farmers may adopt to reduce negative impacts. She does this by combining remote sensing and geospatial analyses with household-level and census datasets to examine farmer decision-making and behavior across large spatial and temporal scales. To date her work has focused on the impacts of weather variability and groundwater depletion on agricultural production in India, and whether farmers are able to adapt their cropping practices to mitigate these impacts.

Stan Jones

Associate Professor

Landscape Architecture

Associate Professor Jones' work focuses upon the issues of inclusive design and social justice and how they impact both design processes and the physical places we help to create. Through his teaching, research and writing, Jones works to clarify how issues pertaining to landscape construction, technology, sustainability, process and form can and should be impacted by a deeper understanding of how the decisions we make as design and planning professionals impact the ability of people to take part in the life of vibrant, healthy landscapes, be they urban, rural, or wild.

Maria Carmen Lemos

Professor; Associate Dean for Research

Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy and Planning

Maria Carmen Lemos' broad research interests are related to the human dimensions of global change and social studies of science. She is particularly interested in understanding: (a) the intersection between development and climate, especially concerning the relationship between anti-poverty programs and risk management (b) the use of technoscientific information, especially seasonal climate (El Nino forecasting) in building adaptive capacity to climate variability and change (drought planning, water management, and agriculture) in the U.S. (Great Lakes) and Latin America (Brazil, Mexico and Chile); (c) the impact of technocratic decisionmaking on issues of democracy and equity; (d) the co-production of science and policy and the role of technocrats as decisionmakers; (e) the role of popular participation in urban environmental policymaking and policymaker/client interactions; (f) U.S.-Mexico border region environmental policymaking especially regarding transboundary water conflict, environmental health, a common use of shared natural resources.

Thomas Lyon

Dow Professor of Sustainable Science, Technology, and Commerce

Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems

Tom Lyon is the Dow Professor of Sustainable Science, Technology and Commerce. His research and teaching interests include environmental information disclosure and greenwash; corporate environmental strategy; environmental NGOs; voluntary environmental agreements; government regulation of business; industrial organization; and energy and the environment.

Paul Mohai

Professor

Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy and Planning

Professor Mohai’s teaching and research interests are focused on environmental justice, public opinion and the environment, and influences on environmental policy making. He is a founder of the Environmental Justice Program at the University of Michigan and a major contributor to the growing body of quantitative research examining disproportionate environmental burdens and their impacts on low income and people of color communities. In 1990, he co-organized with Dr. Bunyan Bryant the “Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards”, which was credited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as one of two events bringing the issue of Environmental Justice to the attention of the Agency. He is author or co-author of numerous articles, books, and reports focused on race and the environment, including “Environmental Racism: Reviewing the Evidence”, “Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards”, “Toxic Waste and Race at Twenty”, and “Which Came First, People or Pollution?”. His current research involves national level studies examining the causes of environmental disparities and the role environmental factors play in accounting for racial and socioeconomic disparities in health. Through a grant from the Kresge Foundation, he is also examining pollution burdens around public schools and the links between such burdens and student performance and health.

Professor Mohai is a past member of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2007-2013). He is currently a member of the Governor’s Environmental Justice Work Group charged with developing an Environmental Justice Plan for Michigan. He is also currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Global Environmental Justice Movement Project (ENVJUSTICE) which is documenting and mapping environmental justice conflicts around the world (http://www.envjustice.org/). Professor Mohai has provided testimony on environmental justice to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1993 and 1999, the U.S. Senate in 2007, and the Michigan Civil Rights Commission in 2016.

Ganapathy Narayanaraj

Visiting Assistant Professor

Environmental Informatics

Dr. Narayanaraj has a wide range of research and teaching interests and experience in geospatial science, field biology, animal behavior and wildland fire ecology.  His experiences have taken him to institutions and organizations in both tropical and temperate countries. His research interests currently focus on using geospatial techniques to map and model the spatial and temporal patterns of devil's gardens in the Amazon, created by ant plants inhabited by Myrmelachistaschumanni. He is also continuing his research on the lightning- and human-caused wildfire regimes at multiple scales using satellite remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems. He was raised in India's Western Ghats, a tropical mountainous region in Southwest India.  Like his grandfather before him, his father was a forester at the Kalakad-Mundanthurai Wildlife Reserve.  Their family has thus been involved in forest management and conservation of the Kalakad-Mundanthurai Wildlife Reserve for more than five decades.

Joshua Newell

Associate Professor

Environmental Informatics, Environmental Justice, Sustainable Systems

Joshua Newell is an assistant professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. He is a broadly trained human-environment geographer, whose research focuses on questions related to urban sustainability, resource consumption, and environmental and social justice. Newell’s current research can be divided into two primary areas of interest. The first, Urban Infrastructure and Form, focuses on structural features of the urban form (e.g. built environment, transport, energy, and water infrastructure). The second research area, Urban Consumption and Commodities, focuses on the interrelationships between the consumption of consumer products, our responsibilities as global 'green' urban citizens, and the role of governance mechanisms and frameworks (including local institutions) in regulating product consumption. His research approach is often multi-scalar and integrative and, in addition to theory and method found in geography and urban planning, he draws upon principles and tools of industrial ecology, and spatial analysis.  Joshua teachesSustainability and Society, a large undergraduate course, and Urban Sustainability, which is designed for MS and PhD students. He also leads a year-long interdisciplinary PhD student workshop that grapples with theories and concepts of urbanism, sustainability, and resilience.

Ivette Perfecto

George Willis Pack Professor

Conservation Ecology, Environmental Justice

I am the George W. Pack Professor of Ecology, Natural Resources and Environment. My research focuses on biodiversity and arthropod-mediated ecosystem services in rural and urban agriculture. I also work on spatial ecology of the coffee agroecosystem and am interested more broadly on the links between small-scale sustainable agriculture, biodiversity and food sovereignty. I am co-author of four books, Breakfast of Biodiversity,  Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty, and Coffee Agroecology, and Ecological Complexity and Agroecology.

My recent research is related to ecosystem services in agroforestry systems in Mexico and Puerto Rico. In Mexico my lab is investigating how local level multi-species interactions generate autonomous pest control in agroecosystems using coffee agroforests as a model system. We are also interested in critical transitions within the pest systems in coffee. In collaboration with John Vandermeer (University of Michigan) and Stacy Philpott (University of California-Santa Cruz) I established a 45-hectare plot in a shaded organic coffee farm in Chiapas, Mexico, and am conducting research on complex ecological interactions among pests, diseases and natural enemies. In Puerto Rico I collaborate with John Vandermeer and Javier Lugo (University of Puerto Rico, Utuado) in a project that examines tradeoffs and synergies among ecosystem services from coffee farms within the Model Forest of Puerto Rico. This project also investigates how ecosystem services (coffee and food provisioning, conservation of biodiversity, pest control, pollination and carbon storate) respond to local and landscape level factors.  In collaboration with Luis Garcia-Barrios from ECOSUR-San Cristobal (Mexico) I am also developing games to help farmers and students better understand ecological complexity in agroecosystems. After Hurricane Maria, we started a research project examining the resistance and resilience of coffee agroecosystems in the central mountainous region of Puerto Rico. Also, in collaboration with Casa Pueblo, a grassroots community organization, and Boricuá, a network of agroecological farmers in Puerto Rico, we are investigating how gasification, using biomass from farm residues and the trees knocked down by the hurricane, could de use to create a hybrid micro-grid that uses solar energy and syngas. We are also investigating the potential impact of the biochar generated through the gasification process on soil properties, plant growth and crop yield.

Teaching Interests:

I teach “Globalization and its Discontent: Struggles for Food, Water and Energy” (Environ 270), Diverse Farming Systems (NRE 553), and Field Ecology (NRE 556). In my courses I like to challenge students to think for themselves. Most of my courses have a strong Latin American flavor because I am from Latin America (Puerto Rico) and I conduct research in Latin America (Mexico, Mesoamerica and Puerto Rico). Most of my courses are interdisciplinary and are taught from a social justice perspective. I teach undergraduate courses in sustainable development and globalization, and the agroecology and political ecology of food systems, a graduate course in field ecology, a graduate course in diverse farming systems, and graduate seminars on topics that range from conservation in fragmented habitats to food sovereignty.

Tony Reames

Assistant Professor

Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems

As a multidisciplinary scholar, with degrees in engineering and social science, Assistant Professor Reames' research agenda seeks to connect the areas of technological advancement, the policy process, and social equity. His research extends the environmental justice scholarship to focus on energy justice. He is currently exploring disparities in residential energy generation, consumption, and affordability- focusing on the production and persistence of inequality by race, class, and place.

Mark D. Rowe

Assistant Research Scientist

Conservation Ecology

My research is focused on development of linked hydrodynamic and biological (biophysical) models to understand and predict changes in the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of aquatic ecosystems. Numerical models of the oceans, large lakes, and the atmosphere are increasingly capable of producing accurate three-dimensional fields of velocities, temperature, and turbulent mixing at fine spatial and temporal scales, which provides new opportunities to explain and predict the influence of these physical variables on aquatic ecosystems in ways that were not previously possible. My recent work has focused on development of linked hydrodynamic and biological models to simulate harmful algal blooms and hypoxia in Lake Erie, and impacts of invasive quagga mussels on primary production, nutrient cycles, and the lower food web of Lake Michigan. My research has contributed to forecast models that provide timely and actionable information to public water systems, anglers, recreational users of Lake Erie.

My previous research topics have included field measurements and modeling of the fate and transport of persistent organic pollutants in the Great Lakes, and of atmosphere-lake interactions.

Samuel Stolper

Assistant Professor

Environmental Policy and Planning

Sam Stolper is an environmental and energy economist. His research, teaching, and writing are aimed at the design and implementation of environmental policy that is both efficient and equitable. He teaches courses on this subject to graduate students at SEAS as well as undergraduates in the Program in the Environment (PitE). Prior to joining SEAS, Sam was a postdoctoral associate at MIT, jointly through the Department of Economics and the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR). He received a Ph.D. in public policy in 2016 from Harvard University and a B.S. in biomedical engineering in 2006 from Brown University.

Mike Wiley

Professor

Conservation Ecology

Professor Wiley's teaching involves various aspects of aquatic  ecology. Research interests include ecology of rivers and lakes, watershed management, community dynamics and population regulation, trout stream food webs, behavioral adaptations of aquatic insects, fish-invertebrate interactions, and fisheries management in North America and SE Asia.

Ming Xu

Director, China Programs; Associate Professor

Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems

Ming Xu is an Associate Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability and in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on the broad fields of sustainable engineering and industrial ecology, with specific interests on trade and environment, environmental impacts of emerging technologies including autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles and biofuels, and big data and data science applications in urban sustainability. At the University of Michigan, he is a core faculty member in the Center for Sustainable Systems, co-directs the Graduate Certificate Program in Industrial Ecology, and currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and the Executive Committee of the China Data Center. He teaches Environmental Footprinting and Input-Output Analysis (NRE 573) at the graduate level and Global Enterprises and Sustainable Development (ENVIRON 367) at the undergraduate level. He was an elected Councilor of the International Society for Industrial Ecology (2013-2015) and has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Resources, Conservation & Recycling (2015 Impact Factor: 3.280) since 2015.

Donald R. Zak

Arthur F. Thurnau Professor; Burton V. Barnes Collegiate Professor of Ecology

Conservation Ecology

Don Zak holds a joint appointment in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, College of Literature, Science, and Arts. His research investigates links between the composition and function of soil microbial communities and the influence of microbial activity on ecosystem-level processes. This work draws on ecology, microbiology, and biochemistry and is focused at several scales of understanding, ranging from the molecular to the ecosystem scale. Current research centers on understanding the link between plant and microbial activity within terrestrial ecosystems, and the influence climate change may have on these dynamics. Teaching includes courses in soil ecology and ecosystem ecology.