Faculty Accolades

Professor Paul Mohai was appointed senior policy adviser at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He joined the Office of Environmental Justice as an expert on quantitative methods, data and tools to assess the impacts of multiple environmental and health burdens in socioeconomically vulnerable and environmentally overburdened communities.

Ivette Perfecto (MS ’82, PhD ’89), the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor of Environmental Justice, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest distinctions for a scientist or engineer in the United States. Her research focuses on the impacts of agriculture on biodiversity and the relationship between biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes.

Johannes Foufopoulos, an associate professor, has co-authored a new book, “Infectious Disease Ecology and Conservation,” about how the general processes causing human disease outbreaks have led to the emergence of numerous new pathogens in wild animals. The book sheds light on the origins and extent of the worsening problem of wild animal diseases and offers solutions to evaluate and control wildlife disease outbreaks and address urgent conservation problems.

Sara Hughes, an associate professor, was appointed associate director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR). She will expand CIGLR’s social science research footprint within her field and more broadly. CIGLR recently was awarded a five-year, $53 million renewal agreement from the federal government to continue and expand its work of helping to conserve and manage the region’s natural resources.

SEAS faculty Mark Lindquist, Derek Van Berkel and Josh Newell are leading the new Sustainable Future Hub, which will support and transform sustainability decision-making on campus and beyond. The hub’s objectives are to 1) develop tools and techniques that can rapidly visualize diverse collections of data, including mapped landscapes, environmental change and social networks, 2) implement and evaluate novel methods for visual interaction with these data, and 3) evaluate the effectiveness of these visual media on decision-making. Their approach will bolster existing research in assessing extended reality, visualization, crowdsourcing and citizen science as novel techniques for broadening community engagement and scientific discovery.

Tony Reames, deputy director for energy justice at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), was awarded the Jan Brinch Award for Collaboration in Public Service by the National Council on Electricity Policy at its annual meeting in September. Reames, an associate professor at SEAS who is on leave while serving in the DOE, received the award in recognition of his widely influential research into the intersections of affordability, access to clean energy resources and related disparities across race, class and place, which has been the cornerstone of discussions about equity among policy makers at all levels of government.

Brian Weeks, an assistant professor, received a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. He is one of 20 early-career scientists and engineers who will each receive $875,000 over five years to pursue their research. Weeks is an evolutionary ecologist who studies how bird species and bird communities have responded to environmental change.