SEAS Faculty
Sara Ana Adlerstein Gonzalez
Associate Research Scientist
Conservation Ecology, Water, Conservation & Restoration
Associate Research Scientist Adlerstein Gonzalez, PhD, is an applied ecologist and visual artist who explores the connections between art and science. As a scientist, she investigates processes at the ecosystem level using statistical modeling. Her main interest in research is to understand ecological processes and population dynamics of aquatic organisms at the ecosystem level, in particular those aspects that are relevant to resource management. Recently she has been investigating spatial and temporal scales needed to study the spatial distribution of fish abundance and obtain indices of abundance of fish populations in marine and freshwater ecosystems. Since fish, as other aquatic organisms, cannot be directly observed, large-scale population studies must rely on analysis of data from scientific surveys or commercial operations. The analysis of this information requires specialized statistical modeling. Currently Alderstein Gonzalez’ focus is in the Great Lakes.
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.
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:
- Using Industrial Symbiosis at the small-scale to increase communities’ sustainability and well-being
- Deploying renewable energy for sustainable development of least industrialized countries
- Developing tools for policy and decision-making through computer modeling of socio-technical systems
Karen Alofs
Assistant Professor
Conservation Ecology, Water, Conservation & Restoration
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.
Joe Árvai
Max McGraw Professor of Sustainable Enterprise; Director, Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise
Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems
Dr. Joe Árvai is the Max McGraw Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the School for Environment and Sustainability, and the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. He is also the Director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. Joe is an internationally respected expert in the risk and decisions sciences, and he is a frequent advisor to governments, government agencies, NGOs, and the private sector.
The research carried out by Joe and his group has two main areas of emphasis: First, Joe and his research group conduct experiments and surveys aimed at advancing our understanding of how people—working individually and in groups—process information and make choices with a specific focus on how people make (or, often, attempt to avoid) necessary 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.
Research in Joe’s group 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. To support their applied focus, Joe and his group conduct research across a wide range topical and pressing decision contexts; these contexts range from environmental risk management and business strategy, to consumer choice and policy-making.
A hallmark of the work in Joe’s group is making results and recommendations from their research available and—importantly—useful to wide range of audiences, including other scholars, policy-makers, business leaders, and the public.
Dima Beletsky
Research Scientist
Conservation Ecology, Conservation & Restoration
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.
Kathleen Bergen
Associate Research Scientist
Conservation Ecology, Environmental Informatics, Conservation & Restoration
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.
Rosina Bierbaum
Professor
Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems, Climate and Energy
Professor and Dean Emerita 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. She also holds an appointment in the School of Public Health at Michigan, and in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Her experience extends from climate science into foreign relations and international development. Rosina served for two decades in both the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. Government, and ran the first Environment Division of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She chairs the Scientific and Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility, served on President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, was an Adaptation Fellow at the World Bank, and a lead author of the U.S. National Climate Assessment. She has lectured on every continent, and in more than 20 countries.
Bierbaum is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America, and Sigma Xi. She received the American Geophysical Union’s Waldo Smith award for ‘extraordinary service to Geoscience’ and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Protection Award. Bierbaum serves on the board of the AAAS, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Federation of American Scientists, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, the Climate Reality Project, the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing, the International Finance Corporation Business and Sustainability Group, and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. She earned a BA in English, a BS in biology and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution.
Jennifer Blesh
Assistant Professor
Conservation Ecology, Food
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.
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 guidelines, and aquatic ecosystem stressors has taken him to all seven continents with Visiting Scientist positions in China, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, and Portugal. His research focuses on sediment and stormwater contaminants and understanding contaminant bioavailability processes, effects and ecological risk at multiple trophic levels, and ranking stressor importance in human dominated watersheds and coastal areas. He has received over ten million dollars in extramural research funding.
He is Director of the Institute for Global Change Biology a Fellow of the international Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC). He served as Director of the University of Michigan Water Center and 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.
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.
Victoria Campbell-Arvai
Assistant Research Scientist
Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Policy and Planning, Conservation & Restoration
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 to understand the roles of knowledge, values, attitudes and beliefs as drivers of direct and indirect pro-environmental behaviors. She also works to improve individual and community engagement on environmental and social issues, and to use insights from judgement and decision-making research to support these participatory processes. 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 green infrastructure, and habitat management and conservation.
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.
Bill Currie
Professor
Conservation Ecology, Environmental Informatics, Conservation & Restoration
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.
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.
Ivan Eastin
Research Professor
Sustainable Systems
Professor Ivan Eastin served as a professor and the Director of the Center for International Trade in Forest Products (CINTRAFOR) in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. He also served as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of the Environment, was the faculty leader for the Peace Corps Masters International Program in Forestry and Sustainable Resource Management and was named a UW CoMotion Presidential Innovation Fellow.
Internationally, his research focuses on understanding how trade policies, including timber legality regulations, affect the international trade of wood products in general and the competitiveness of US wood products in particular. Domestically, Eastin's research focuses on the process of innovation and evaluating the factors that influence the introduction and adoption of new wood products, including mass timber products such as thermally modified wood and cross-laminated timber. He also works with Native American communities to improve their capacity to more effectively market tribal wood products in the US and internationally.
Ivan received his master’s degree in wood science and technology from Michigan Technological University (1985) and his doctorate degree in forest products marketing from the University of Washington (1992). He has served as a Fullbright Fellow in Ghana, a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia and in the US Army. He was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.
Paige Fischer
Assistant Professor
Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Policy and Planning, Conservation & Restoration
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 strives to address problems of concern to local practitioners.
Johannes Foufopoulos
Associate Professor
Conservation Ecology, Conservation & Restoration
Johannes Foufopoulos, PhD, focuses his lab research on fundamental conservation biology questions and on issues related to the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. Major research projects examine how habitat fragmentation, invasive organisms and global climate change result in species extinction. Other projects address questions regarding the impact of diseases on wildlife populations and the environmental causes leading to disease emergence.
Bob Grese
Professor; Theodore Roosevelt Chair of Ecosystem Management; Director, Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum
Behavior, Education and Communication, Conservation Ecology, Landscape Architecture, Conservation & Restoration
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.
Drew Gronewold
Associate Professor
Conservation Ecology, Climate and Energy, Water
Professor Gronewold’s research interests lie in hydrological modeling, with a focus on propagating uncertainty and variability into model-based water resources management decisions. His specific research areas include predicting runoff in ungauged basins, monitoring and understanding water quality dynamics in coastal areas, and incorporating probability theory and Bayesian statistics into watershed-scale data sets and forecasting tools.
He holds an adjunct appointment in the U-M Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Prior to his appointment in SEAS, he worked in the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory as a hydrologist and physical scientist.
Rebecca D. Hardin
Associate Professor
Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Justice, Conservation & Restoration
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.
MaryCarol Hunter
Associate Professor
Behavior, Education and Communication, Landscape Architecture, Climate and Energy, Cities, the Built Environment, and Mobility
Dr. MaryCarol Hunter is a landscape architect and ecologist with a research program that encompasses social, psychological and ecological aspects of sustainable urban design. Recently funded work focuses on the design of resilient urban green space under climate change and current work focuses on the impact of nature experiences on mental wellbeing. She also develops research-based design guidelines in support urban sustainability by creating places that people appreciate and protect.
Inés Ibáñez
Associate Professor
Conservation Ecology, Climate and Energy, Conservation & Restoration, Cities, the Built Environment, and Mobility
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.
Pamela Jagger
Associate Professor
Environmental Policy and Planning, Climate and Energy
Pam Jagger is a global leader in interdisciplinary population and environment research. She is an applied political economist whose research focuses on the dynamics of poverty and environment interactions in low-income countries. She leads the interdisciplinary Forest Use, Energy, and Livelihoods (FUEL) Lab, and is the Director of the National Science Foundation funded Energy Poverty PIRE in Southern Africa (EPPSA), a 5-year collaborative program to support research and training on the topic of energy access in Southern Africa. FUEL Lab research is currently organized around three themes: environment and livelihoods, environmental governance, and energy poverty. The first theme focuses on quantifying the role of forests and the other environmental resources in household consumption and income generation, and understanding how contributions change in response to land use land cover change, implementation of conservation and development projects, and population dynamics. The second theme examines the livelihood impacts of changes in environmental governance and institutions on access to environmental goods and services. The third theme examines household energy access including understanding the effectiveness of interventions designed to mitigate energy poverty and improve access to electricity and cleaner cooking and novel research questions related to the effects of land cover and land use change on energy access and human health. Dr. Jagger has worked as a policy research scholar with the World Bank, Resources for the Future, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Center for International Forestry Research.
Meha Jain
Assistant Professor
Environmental Informatics, Environmental Justice, Climate and Energy, Food
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.
Thomas Johengen
Research Scientist
Conservation Ecology
Dr. Johengen is an Associate Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR), which is a NOAA Joint Institute program at the University of Michigan with the NOAA-Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory serving as the host lab. CIGLR's research activities are focused around five themes including: Climate and Large-Lake Dynamics, Coastal and Nearshore Processes, Lare-Lake Ecosystem Structure and Function, Remote Sensing, and Marine Environmental Engineering. Dr. Johengen's individual research interests focus on nutrient cycling and lower food-web dynamics in the Great Lakes, controlling the introduction of invasive species, and development of in situ water quality sensors and observing systems.
Current research projects include: NOAA-CSCOR, Impacts of multiple stressors on the Saginaw Bay, Lake Huron ecosystem; NOAA-IOOS, Alliance for Coastal Technologies; NOAA-IOOS, Implementation of the Great Lakes Observing System; USEPA, Monitoring Long-trem trends in the lower food web of the Great Lakes; GLFT, Examining Causes and Consequences of the decline of Diporeia in the Great Lakes.
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.
Greg Keoleian
Peter M. Wege Endowed Professor of Sustainable Systems; Director, Center for Sustainable Systems
Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems, Climate and Energy
Dr. Keoleian co-founded and serves as director of the Center for Sustainable Systems. His research focuses on the development and application of life cycle models and metrics to enhance the sustainability of products and technology. He has pioneered new methods in life cycle design, life cycle optimization of product replacement, life cycle cost analysis and life cycle based sustainability assessments ranging from energy analysis and carbon footprints to social indicators. Systems studied include alternative vehicle technology, renewable energy systems such as wind farms, photovoltaics and willow biomass electricity, buildings and infrastructure, information technology, food and agricultural systems, household appliances, and packaging alternatives.
Professor Keoleian currently teaches interdisciplinary graduate courses on Sustainable Energy Systems and Industrial Ecology and co-directs the Engineering Sustainable Systems Dual Degree Program and the Rackham Graduate Certificate Program in Industry Ecology.
Maria Carmen Lemos
Professor; Associate Dean for Research
Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy and Planning, Climate and Energy
Maria Carmen Lemos' broad research interests are related to climate adaptation and the role of knowledge in building adaptive capacity. She is particularly interested in understanding: (a) the co-production of science and decision-making and the creation of actionable knowledge; (b) the intersection between development and climate, especially concerning the relationship between anti-poverty programs and risk management; (c) the use of climate information in building adaptive capacity in different sectors (e.g. drought planning, water management, agriculture, and urban planning); and (d) the impact of technocratic decision-making on issues of democracy and equity.
Lemos was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR5) and the Fourth US National Climate Assessment (NCA4), contribute to IPCC-AR4, and has served in a number of the US National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences committees including Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change (2007 and 2009), America Climate Choice Science Panel (2010) and the Board on Environmental Change and Society (2008-2014) and the Council Committee to Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP)—(2011-13).
Mark Lindquist, ASLA, PhD
Assistant Professor
Behavior, Education and Communication, Landscape Architecture, Cities, the Built Environment, and Mobility
Mark Lindquist, ASLA, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture. Mark’s research and teaching focus on the design and evaluation of high performance landscapes with an emphasis on multifunctional green infrastructure in urban areas. He is particularly interested in understanding how engaging with computation and data can transform the design process as well as inform decision making by stakeholders. Mark conducts empirical research with the aim of providing an evidence base to support the design and planning of environments that perform ecologically, socially and culturally for more sustainable outcomes.
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.
Shelie Miller
Director, Program in the Environment; Jonathan W. Bulkley Collegiate Professor of Sustainable Systems; U-M Distinguished Faculty Fellow in Sustainability
Sustainable Systems
Professor Miller's research uses life cycle assessment and scenario modeling to identify environmental problems before they occur. Historically, our society has taken a reactionary approach to the environment. By proactively understanding the environmental issues of emerging technologies, we can identify a greater number of options and more creative solutions to avoid or reduce negative consequences. Miller's research group works on a variety of energy-related topics, including the energy-water nexus, bioenergy, refrigeration in the food system, and autonomous vehicles.
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.
Michael R. Moore
Professor; U-M Distinguished Faculty Fellow in Sustainability; Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems, Water
Michael Moore's teaching involves courses in microeconomics, environmental economics, and ecosystem services. His research interests include water resource economics and environmental economics. He has ongoing research to develop models of the environmentally responsible consumer (with applications to consumption of green electricity); to study land-use adaptation to weather risk and climate change; and to value water quality using the hedonic price method.
Joan Iverson Nassauer
Professor
Environmental Policy and Planning, Landscape Architecture, Water, Cities, the Built Environment, and Mobility
Joan Iverson Nassauer is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Landscape and Urban Planning. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (1992), Fellow of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (2007), Distinguished Practitioner of Landscape Ecology in the US (1998), and was named Distinguished Scholar by the International Association of Landscape Ecology (2007). She develops and tests ecological designs for their cultural sustainability in human-dominated landscapes, with a long-time emphasis on watershed and water infrastructure design and management. Her teaching and research apply this approach to metropolitan and agricultural landscapes – ranging from continental scale implications of agricultural practices to neighborhood scale implications of green stormwater infrastructure.
Joshua Newell
Associate Professor
Environmental Informatics, Environmental Justice, Sustainable Systems, Cities, the Built Environment, and Mobility
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 teaches Sustainability 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.
Jonathan T. Overpeck, Ph.D.
Samuel A. Graham Dean; William B. Stapp Collegiate Professor of Environmental Education; Professor, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering
Climate and Energy
Professor Overpeck is an interdisciplinary climate scientist and the Samuel A. Graham Dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan.
Overpeck has written over 210 published works on climate and the environmental sciences, served as a Working Group 1 Coordinating Lead Author for the Nobel Prize winning IPCC 4th Assessment (2007), and also as a Working Group 2 Lead Author for the IPCC 5th Assessment (2014). Other awards include the US Dept. of Commerce Gold and Bronze Medals, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Walter Orr Roberts award of the American Meteorological Society, and the Quivira Coalition’s Radical Center Award for his work with rural ranchers and land managers.
He has active climate research programs on five continents, focused on understanding drought and megadrought dynamics (and risk) the world over, and has also served as the lead investigator of Climate Assessment for the Southwest and the SW Climate Science Center – two major programs focused on regional climate adaptation. Overpeck also works more broadly on climate and paleoclimate dynamics, ice sheets and sea level, climate-vegetation interaction, conservation biology, legal issues related to climate change, environmental communication and environmental education. He has appeared and testified before Congress multiple times, is a Fellow of AGU and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and tweets about climate-related issues @GreatLakesPeck .
Ivette Perfecto
George Willis Pack Professor
Conservation Ecology, Environmental Justice, Food
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.
Thomas Princen
Associate Professor
Environmental Policy and Planning
Thomas Princen, PhD, explores ecological and economic sustainability at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order and The Logic of Sufficiency(both published by the MIT Press).
Tony Reames
Assistant Professor
Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy and Planning, Sustainable Systems, Climate and Energy
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.
Catherine Riseng
Interim Director, Research Program Manager, and Associate Research Scientist
Conservation Ecology, Water
Catherine Riseng, PhD, is an Assistant Research Scientist and aquatic ecologist with specific focus on fluvial ecosystems and benthic invertebrate ecology. She is interested in assessing and understanding the effects of human landscape alteration on river and lake ecosystems. Her work has included landscape-based models of riverine condition using biological indicators and regression-based models that predict expected condition for rivers of Michigan and Wisconsin. She has also led development of a large geo-spatial database and classification framework, the Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework.
Paul Seelbach
Professor of Practice
Conservation Ecology, Water
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.
Samuel Stolper
Assistant Professor
Environmental Policy and Planning, Climate and Energy
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.
Dorceta E. Taylor
James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor; Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy and Planning, Food
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.
Brian Weeks
Assistant Professor
Conservation Ecology, Conservation & Restoration, Emerging Theme
Brian Weeks is joining SEAS on September 1 as an assistant professor, with courtesy appointments in LSA's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), as well as with the U-M Museum of Zoology. He is a conservation ornithologist and an evolutionary ecologist who studies the assembly of biological communities, and how different assembly histories can impact biotic responses to global change.Since 2017, Weeks has been at U-M, as a postdoctoral research fellow in EEB, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Museum of Zoology. He integrates his training in systematics and community ecology to examine community-level biotic responses to global change. In his research, he asks whether differences in the assembly histories of communities have altered their ecologies, with a focus on their vulnerability. Weeks’ research is focused on the birds of the Solomon Islands, and integrates field biology, molecular phylogenetics, and collections-based comparative morphology.
Julia M. Wondolleck
Associate Professor
Behavior, Education and Communication, Environmental Policy and Planning
Julia Wondolleck’s research and teaching is focused on the collaborative dimension of marine, coastal and terrestrial ecosystem management. She is interested in the structure of policy and administrative processes that promote the sustainability of ecological and human systems in the face of diverse yet legitimate interests, scientific complexity, and often conflicting and ambiguous legal direction. Wondolleck has spent over 30 years examining the emergence and functioning of inter-organizational and community-based collaborative processes in ecosystem-scale resource planning and management. These processes often arise in response to natural and/or social system crises. This research looks at both conflict and collaboration in the management of public natural resources and, in particular, the factors that promote and sustain collaborative resource management processes over time. Current research projects include: assessing lessons for policy and practice from marine and coastal ecosystem-based management initiatives around the world; understanding the factors that enable resilience of local communities; examining effective end user engagement in collaborative science; and, advancing understanding of the connections between the factors that encourage and sustain collaborative ecosystem management initiatives and the institutional arrangements that might better enable community-level adaptation to the effects of climate change.
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.
Steven L. Yaffee
Professor
Behavior, Education and Communication, Conservation Ecology, Environmental Policy and Planning
Professor Yaffee's research focuses on collaborative decision making on complex environmental and sustainability choices, including the ways that traditional political processes and organizations function, and how new collaborative structures can be developed to encourage more effective decision making. He is particularly interested in landscape-scale conservation and sustainable natural resource management, and how decision-making institutions can be encouraged to take on an ecosystem-scale perspective. Of particular interest is policy involving biological diversity, public lands, marine and coastal ecosystems and energy. Yaffee's research and teaching draws from substantial on-the-ground work with nonprofit organizations and charitable foundations in facilitating dispute resolution and collaborative problem-solving processes, and in helping them develop monitoring, evaluation and adaptive management strategies. He is committed to professional education at SEAS and teaches skill-building courses in political and institutional analysis, negotiation and mediation.
Donald R. Zak
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor; Burton V. Barnes Collegiate Professor of Ecology
Conservation Ecology, Conservation & Restoration
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.
Michaela Theresia Zint
Professor
Behavior, Education and Communication
Professor Zint led the development of My Environmental Education Evaluation Resource (MEERA). MEERA provides environmental educators with resources to conduct and improve evaluations of their programs. Dr. Zint conducts on-going research on predicting responsible environmental behavior. A current study seeks to identify ways a federal watershed education grant program can foster changes in teachers’ environmental education practices and students’ environmental actions. Her research interests include environmental education (behavior change, program evaluation, education for sustainability, professional development, pre-service education); environmental (risk) communication; social sciences and environment; business & environment (especially green marketing); water/fish/fisheries/Great Lakes (issues related to education, communication).