SEAS Faculty

Jose F. Alfaro

Assistant Professor of Practice

Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems

Dr. Alfaro’s work uses engineering and complex systems tools such as Agent-Based Modeling, System Dynamics, and Network Science. In line with his position as a Professor of the Practice, Dr. Alfaro’s scholarship has an applied focus.  This has led him to work closely with communities, industry, NGO’s, and government organizations in developing his work. Dr. Alfaro is also the founder and faculty director of Sustainability Without Borders, an interdisciplinary student organization that works with communities to develop ethical partnerships for learning and enhancing sustainability.  This organization labors to provide students with a meaningful engaged experience that also increases the capacity of the communities and NGO’s it works with and increases their well-being. 

Dr. Alfaro’s scholarship revolves around three main efforts:

1. Using Industrial Symbiosis at the small-scale to increase communities’ sustainability and well-being
2. Deploying renewable energy for sustainable development of least industrialized countries
3. Developing tools for policy and decision-making through computer modeling of socio-technical systems

Joe Arvai

Max McGraw Professor of Sustainable Enterprise; Director, Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise

Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems

Joe Arvai, PhD, is the Max McGraw Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the School for Environment and Sustainability, and the Ross School of Business. He is also the Director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise.  Joe is an internationally recognized expert in the risk and decisions sciences; his research has two main areas of emphasis: First,  Joe and his research group conduct experiments focused on advancing our understanding of how people process information and make decisions, with a specific emphasis on how people make tradeoffs. Second, Joe and his team conduct research focused on developing and testing decision-aiding tools and approaches that can be used by people to improve decision quality across a wide range of environmental, social, and economic contexts.  His research is applied, and accounts for decision-making by a broad spectrum of public and stakeholder groups, as well as by technical experts, business leaders, and policy makers.  His work also focuses on choices made by people individually, and when working in groups.  Likewise, he conducts his research across a wide range of contexts, ranging from environmental risk management, to consumer choice and policy-making.  Joe is a former member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Chartered Science Advisory Board, and he is a current member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' Board on Environmental Change and Society.

Kathleen Bergen

Associate Research Scientist

Conservation Ecology, Environmental Informatics

Associate Research Scientist Kathleen Bergen, PhD, works in the areas of human dimensions of environmental change; remote sensing, GIS and biodiversity Informatics; and environmental health and informatics. Her focus is on combining field and geospatial data and methods to study the pattern and process of ecological systems, biodiversity and health. She also strives to build bridges between science and social science to understand the implications of human actions on the social and natural systems of which we are a part.

Jennifer Blesh

Assistant Professor

Conservation Ecology

As a broadly trained agroecologist, Jennifer Blesh, PhD, uses interdisciplinary research approaches to understand how different agrifood systems impact ecological and social processes. Her ecological research focuses on soil nitrogen and carbon biogeochemical cycles, agroecosystem nutrient management, and legume nitrogen fixation. Blesh’s research program pays particular attention to alternative production-consumption relations, and is guided by a pragmatic motivation to support development of more ecologically sustainable and equitable food systems. Previous to her position at SEAS, Blesh served as a post-doctoral fellow with the National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship Program at the Federal University of Mato Grosso in Brazil. Current projects include assessing the socioecological resilience of family farms in Brazil, and research in the U.S. centered on cropping system diversification through winter cover crops and improving nitrogen retention in farm fields.

Bilal Butt

Associate Professor

Environmental Informatics, Environmental Justice

Bilal Butt, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability and a faculty affiliate of the African Studies Center and the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program. Dr. Butt is a people-environment geographer with regional specialization in sub-Saharan Africa and technical expertise in geospatial technologies (GPS, GIS & Remote Sensing), ecological monitoring and social-scientific appraisals. His general research interests lie at the intersection of the natural and social sciences to answer questions of how people and wildlife are coping with, and adapting to changing climates, politics, livelihoods and ecologies in arid and semi-arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa.  His current projects investigate: (1) the spatiality of livelihood strategies (resource access and utilization) among pastoral peoples under regimes of increasing climatic variability and uncertainty; (2) the nature of the relationships between wildlife and livestock in dry land pastoral ecosystems of East Africa - examining questions of wildlife-livestock competition; (3) violent and non-violent conflicts over natural resources, and; (4) how mobile technologies influence resource access, use and control. 

Bradley J. Cardinale

Professor; Director, Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR)

Conservation Ecology

Professor Cardinale is an ecologist who uses mathematical models, novel experiments, observational studies and meta-analyses to examine how human activities impact biological diversity, and to predict how changes in biodiversity affect the goods and services ecosystems provide to humanity. His research, teaching, and professional service are all tied together by a common thread, which is to produce and distribute the knowledge needed to conserve and restore the variety of life on Earth.

Professor Cardinale teaches classes in Conservation Biology, Ecological Restoration, and Ecosystem Services. He has published more than 110 scientific papers and popular articles, and won numerous awards. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Ecological Society of America.  In 2014, Cardinale was named one of ‘The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds′ by Thomson Reuters, one of the main sources of impact factors used in the assessment of scientific articles and careers. 

Raymond De Young

Associate Professor

Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Policy and Planning, Landscape Architecture, Food, Emerging Theme

Raymond De Young, PhD, is a broadly trained psychologist, planner, and engineer. He serves as an Associate Professor of Environmental Psychology and Planning at SEAS, an Associate Professor in the Program in the Environment (PitE), a Faculty Associate at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum, and a Faculty Affiliate for the Graham Sustainability Institute. His research focus is on the process of re-localization, a response to emerging biophysical limits and the consequences of having deeply disrupted the Earth's ecosystems. De Young applies conservation and environmental psychology principles to the challenge of helping people to envision and adopt pragmatic behavioral responses that support an urgent transition to a life lived within local resource limits. Despite what for some people is a dismal forecast, his work is decidedly hopeful. He is described as neither an optimist nor pessimist when it comes to human behavior, but rather an idealist without illusions.

His current work includes both theoretical and empirical research on (1) helping people to pre-familiarize themselves with the behavioral apsects of the coming resource downshift, (2) motivating environmental stewardship and voluntary simplicity using intrinsic motivation and innate satisfactions and (3) using nature to restore the mental vitality needed for responding to and coping with the lean and difficult yet exciting times ahead. Two current projects include examining the psychological foundations of behavioral aesthetics and behavioral entrepreneurship, and the promotion of voluntary simplicity.

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.

Paul Seelbach

Professor of Practice

Conservation Ecology

Professor Seelbach's experiences bridge the academic study of aquatic ecosystems to its application across a range of resource management agencies. He has worked for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Fisheries Division as Research Scientist and Statewide Research Director; for the USGS Great Lakes Science Center, as Coastal Ecosystems Branch Chief; for the Great Lakes Commission as Senior Science Advisor; and currently serves the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Office of the Great Lakes, as Senior Fellow. He has helped with major initiatives regarding watershed assessment and management, ecological flows and water allocation policy, water resources monitoring, coastal zone management, and revitalization of Areas of Concern.

Regarding science, Paul applies a landscape-ecology approach to understanding the structure and function of riverine and nearshore ecosystems. He is interested in system elements such as: spatial heterogeneity and context, scales and hierarchy, driving processes, and the human footprint.  Regarding aquatic practice, Paul is interested in promoting effective knowledge transfer to management and governance decision processes and in nurturing development of professional and leadership skills.

Dorceta E. Taylor

James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor; Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy and Planning

Professor Taylor's research interests include urban agriculture, food access, and food insecurity; institutional diversity; analysis of the composition of the environmental workforce; social movement analysis; environmental justice; leisure and natural resource use; poverty; and race, gender, and ethnic relations. Her current research includes an assessment of food access in Michigan and other parts of the country. A recently-published article on food justice in Detroit entitled, "Food Availability and the Food Desert Frame in Detroit: An Overview of the City’s Food Systemstates" (Environmental Practice), exemplify this work.

Other recent research activities include the 2014 national report analyzing racial and gender diversity in the environmental field -- see The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations:  Mainstream NGOs, Foundations, and Government Agencies. Her 2009 book, The Environment and the People in American Cities (Duke University Press), is an award-winning urban environmental history book. She published an edited volume in 2010 entitled, Environment and Social Justice:  An International Perspective (Emerald Press).  She published oxic Communities:  Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (NYU Press) in 2014. Her newest book, Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection: Social Inequality and the Rise of the American Conservation Movement (Duke University Press) is currently in press; it is slated for publication in 2015.

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. 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 as the Director of China Programs in School for Environment and Sustainability. He teaches Environmental Footprinting and Input-Output Analysis (EAS 573) and Systems Thinking for Sustainable Development and Enterprise (EAS 550/Strategy 566). He received the Robert A. Laudise Medal from International Society for Industrial Ecology for “outstanding achievement in industrial ecology by a researcher under the age of 36” in 2015 and the US National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2016. Currently he serves as the President of Chinese Society for Industrial Ecology and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Resources, Conservation & Recycling (2017 Impact Factor: 5.12). He was elected to Chair the 2022 Gordon Research Conference on Industrial Ecology.

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.