CHANGE Retreat 2010 - click photo for larger image

Cohort 2011

Kyle Bartowitz is a Master's student in the Water Resources Management program in the Nelson Institute. He is interested broadly in maintaining and conserving safe and adequate drinking water sources in the face of large draw-downs due to population increases and pollution. Specifically, he is interested in methods conserving water on the levels of the watershed, the water utility, the business/home-owner, and the individual. Kyle graduated from UW-Madison in 2011 with a Bachelor's Degree in Zoology and a Certificate in Environmental Studies.

Phillip Duran (Fellow) is an MS/PhD student in the Environment and Resources program at the Nelson Institute for the Environment and the Energy Analysis and Policy Certificat Student Representative.  As a recipient of the Wes & Ankie Foell Graduate Student Award in Energy Analysis and Policy and a National Science Foundation CHANGE-IGERT Fellow, Phillip will complete the Energy Analysis and Policy (EAP) Certificate as well as the Certificate for Humans and the Global Environment (CHANGE). Advised by Tracey Holloway and Bernie Lesieutre, he works at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE).

In 2008, Phillip graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering.  After graduation Phillip spent a year in South America, volunteering in Columbia, Peru and Ecuador, including two months in the Galapagos Islands where he worked to promote island conservation.

After returning from South America in 2010, Phillip worked in Washington DC, dedicating most of his time to the House Committee on Science and Technology but also working some with the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

During the summer of 2011, Phillip was a visiting research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO working to close the gap between research labs and academia and to explore the feasibility of large scale renewables in the US energy grid.

Currently, Phillip is pursuing thesis research and hopes to merge Tracey Holloway and Bernie Lesieutre’s expertise in atmospheric modeling and electricity production and distribution with his own background in Electrical Engineering to explore the air quality and climate impacts of electricity and energy production while characterizing the social impacts of energy policies.  He is especially interested in the impacts renewable energy penetration into the electricity generation market.

Outside of his research, Phillip is interested in all forms of sport and outdoor activities.  He also enjoys video games, computers, and gadgetry.  As often as possible, Phillip enjoys travelling and seeing new parts of the world.

Trevor Ghylin is a PhD student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering program. Trevor is the recipient of a Biotechnology Training Program (NIH) Fellowship and is focused on microbiology and the environment, especially water quality.
Trevor received a B.S. in Civil Engineering (Environmental Focus) from the University of North Dakota in 2004. Trevor went on to complete a M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 2006 under the advisement of Professor Trina McMahon. He then worked for CH2M Hill as an environmental engineer for 5 years, focusing on wastewater and drinking water treatment, as well as sediment and groundwater cleanup.

Trevor enjoys hiking, kayaking, music (especially summer outdoor concerts), and cross country skiing. He also enjoys brewing beer, playing guitar (although not well), and travelling the world to experience new places, people and cultures.

Caitlin Kontgis (Fellow) is a PhD student in the Geography department and a recipient of the National Science Foundation CHANGE-IGERT fellowship. Mentored by Annemarie Schneider, Caitlin’s research interests focus on applying remote sensing techniques to investigating how human populations interact with their surrounding environments. Specifically, Caitlin is currently researching land use change and patterns of urban expansion in northern Vietnam.

Prior to enrolling at UW Madison, Caitlin spent a summer working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California using MISR satellite data to assess air quality in the Los Angeles basin. She also earned a Master’s degree in Environmental Health Sciences at UC Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree in Geography from UC Santa Barbara. In her spare time, Caitlin greatly enjoys traveling, SCUBA diving, cooking, walking her dogs and spending time with family.

Katie Lewkowicz is a first year PhD student in Science Education in the Curriculum and Instruction department at the School of Education, advised by Noah Feinstein.  She plans to investigate how environmental sustainability can play a central role in making middle school science education more rigorous as well as culturally relevant. 

Katie graduated from Williams College in 2006 with a B.A. in Psychology and a concentration in Neuroscience.  She served as a Fulbright teaching assistant in Spain, teaching English and science to third graders.

For the past four years, Katie has taught 5th and 6th grade science at an urban middle school.  She experimented with incorporating environmental sustainability issues into the curriculum.  She observed that students were eager to connect the science they were learning to urgent local and global problems.  She is in the process of developing a curriculum of student-facilitated investigations related to climate change, biodiversity and interdependence. 

Currently, Katie is studying multicultural and science education in the School of Education.  She also looks forward to working with her CHANGE cohort, learning from their expertise in diverse areas and applying this to the middle school science classroom.

Claire Luby is a MS student in the Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics program, advised by Irwin Goldman. While currently studying the human health aspects of vegetable crops, she is more broadly interested in the impact agriculture has on the surrounding environment. She hopes to use skills acquired in her MS program and past experiences to pursue a career at the intersection of agriculture, climate change, and public health.

Claire graduated from Middlebury College in 2010, majoring in biology and minoring in Chinese and economics. After graduating, she spent 3 months in Panama leading trips for high school students before moving to Washington DC to work on the Presidential Commission on the BP oil spill and offshore drilling.

Outside of school and research, Claire is an avid Nordic skier and an enthusiast of most outdoor endurance sports including running and cycling. She also enjoys cooking and travelling internationally to practice her Spanish and Chinese language skills and learn about different parts of the world.

Fei Ma is a master's student in the Geography Department.

Bettina Miguez is pursuing a M.Sc. degree in Soil Science. Her research is looking at new ways to quantify drainage in the Central Sands of Wisconsin, where the water table has been steadily decreasing in the last few years. She is advised by Sam Kung, Birl Lowery and Bill Bland.
After graduating from Princeton University's Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Bettina worked for three years in an environmental engineering consulting firm, preparing human health risk assessments and evaluating remediation options for contaminated sites.
She is interested in working towards sustainable solutions of environmental issues that arise in urban, industrial and rural environments. She hopes that the CHANGE certificate will help her be a positive, constructive voice when engaging other parties in the course of her professional life.

Alexis L Ritzer is a graduate student in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Science department. She is advised by Galen McKinley and researches in the field of ocean biogeochemistry. Alexis is very interested in the impacts of climate change on carbon sinks, specifically changes in air-sea interactions, and the effect the ocean has on the carbon cycle.

Alexis graduated with a BS in Chemistry with a minor in Environmental Studies from Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX in 2010. During her time at Southwestern, she researched conservation ecology, population genetics, and analytical chemistry. She also studied abroad in Europe for a semester.

Marian Weidner is an Environment & Resources master's student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.  Advised by Gary Green in the Department of Community & Environmental Sociology, she is broadly interested in the intersection between poverty alleviation and natural resource management. Her research will address community-based biodiversity conservation and rural economic development near protected areas.  Specifically, she hopes to explore community health and livelihood strategies in fragile ecosystems in East Asia.

Marian returns to Madison after earning her B.S. in Rural Sociology & Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin in 2006.  Following her graduation, she spent a summer in northern China working as a research assistant to a geologist mapping ancient lakes in the Ordos Basin.  She then relocated to San Francisco where she worked as a paralegal in environmental law & toxic torts litigation.  Most recently, Marian has returned to the United States from the Atlas Mountains of  Morocco where she lived in a small village for two years while volunteering with the Peace Corps.

In her free time, Marian enjoys practicing Mandarin, hiking, camping and long-distance running.

Cohort 2010

Kathryn Anderson (Fellow) is pursuing dual PhD s in Sociology and in the Environment and Resources program of the Nelson Institute. She is co-advised by professor Chris Kucharik in SAGE/Agronomy and Katherine Curtis in Sociology. Anderson is a National Science Foundation CHANGE-IGERT Fellow studying the social factors (culture, institutions, and markets) that influence current agricultural systems, and the implications of these systems for environmental and social stratification outcomes. In the Yahara Watershed, Anderson plans to integrate sociological processes of farm consolidation and rural demographic shifts into ecosystem services models of various future land use and climate scenarios being developed by Kucharik and collaborators. She also is working with a Portuguese team to evaluate the effectiveness of EU agro-ecological payments to protect threatened bird species in the Castro Verde region of Alentejo.

Anderson comes to SAGE with a BA in Psychology from Wesleyan University, an MS in Agricultural and Applied Economics from UW, and research experience at the RAND Corporation in California, the United Nations in Bolivia, and IPEA (Institute for Applied Economic Research) in Brazil. Most recently, she worked as an economics researcher for the North Temperate Lakes LTER, where she did non-market valuation projects of lake amenities and worked on bio-economic modeling of aquatic invasive species spread.

In her free time, Kathryn tries to play fiddle and frisbee, work on her house, and travel to Portugal, where her fiancée is from.

Brittany Bovard is broadly interested in the intersection of large carnivore behavior and ecology and the human dimensions of carnivore policy and management. She is addressing theoretical questions about the functional response of wolves to decreases in primary prey abundance and whether that leads to prey switching (i.e. from deer to livestock) vs. range shifting (into areas of higher deer densities) in a mixed agricultural landscape. She hopes to identify predictor variables that may then be applied to reduce the risk of livestock to depredation by wolves, thereby preventing wolf-human conflict. Additionally, she hopes to work alongside agriculturalists to better understand neighboring farmers with opposing views of wildlife, particularly those facing livestock depredation by wolves and/or crop damage by deer, and how they manage those differences within their communities. Through the use of interdisciplinary research, Brittany hopes to apply knowledge about human-carnivore coexistence to solve current issues of wolf management and conservation.

Virginia Carlton is a dual degree PhD student in the Environment and Resources program at the Nelson Institute and in the Curriculum and Instruction program within the School of Education. Her primary interest is environmental/sustainability education. She is advised by Drs. Susan Thering and Noah Feinstein.

Ginny graduated from UW-Stevens Point in 1997 with a MS degree in Natural Resources Management. Her thesis served as the final report for a multi-million dollar National Science Foundation grant and investigated the classroom instructional practices and school-wide leadership skills of educators who had completed varying degrees of professional development coursework related to environmental education.

Ginny is currently employed by the Wisconsin Environmental Education Board and also serves as an adjunct faculty member for UW-Stevens Point, College of Natural Resources. She is actively engaged with the work of Wisconsin’s No Child Left Inside Coalition, a task force of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction charged with developing a K-12 environmental literacy plan.

Although a dissertation proposal has yet to be submitted, Ginny anticipates her work will continue to investigate the intersections between professional development of teachers, technology integration, and environmental literacy.

Ryan Marsh is pursuing a M.Sc. degree in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development through the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He has spent several years working on conservation issues with impoverished communities in Madagascar. His research interests lie at the nexus of poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation and include forest governance, community-based natural resource management, payments for environmental services, biodiversity conservation, and participatory analysis in the developing world tropics.

His Master’s thesis investigates the effects of two conservation incentive program on forest use and local natural resource management in the eastern rainforest corridor of Madagascar. His research entwines household interviews, focus groups, forest transects, and participatory analysis in a mixed methodology approach. With B.S. degrees in Zoology and Anthropology, Ryan is committed to developing and utilizing inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to transcend the human/environment divide, drawing on theory from political ecology, landscape ecology, conservation biology and science studies, amongst others.

Grace Nguyen (Fellow) is a graduate student in the sociology department at UW-Madison. As an NSF CHANGE-IGERT Fellow, advised by Samer Alatout, she is interested in the effects of environment, agriculture, and US food policy on issues surrounding poverty and hunger.  

Grace holds a B.S. in Environmental Economics and Policy from UC Berkeley and a M.A. in Food Studies from New York University. At UW-Madison, she hopes to take an interdisciplinary approach to explore how information and discourse about food policy addresses issues of food inequality, especially relating to the  environmental sustainability movement.

Erik Olson (Fellow) is a PhD student in the Environment & Resources Program with the Nelson Institute. Currently, Erik is interested in multiple facets of wolf-human interactions. First, using data for the state of Wisconsin he is attempting to predict dog depredations, so as to reduce the number of future depredations and wolf-human conflicts. Second, Erik is interested in examining the ecological relationships between deer, wolves, and farmers. Erik plans to explore how fluctuations in local deer populations affect wolf behavior. He hopes his research will shed light on deer, wolf, crop damage, and livestock depredation management. Lastly, Erik is interested in the application of non-invasive survey techniques, primarily camera traps, to understand interactions between carnivores and their prey.

Erik recently received his MS in Environment & Resources with the Nelson Institute. He examined the ecology and management of Eurasian watermilfoil, Myriophyllum spicatum, in Wisconsin’s third largest lake, the Chippewa Flowage. He also co-authored an aquatic plant management plan for the Chippewa Flowage, critiqued Sawyer County’s Draft Land-use Plan, and investigated the use/adaptation of a geospatial model for determining shoreline erosion.

A native to northern Wisconsin, Erik graduated from UW-Stevens Point with a major in biology. After graduating he worked on a variety of field research projects and a couple stints as a dockhand in the Alaskan panhandle, Erik took a Natural Resource Specialist position at the Lac Coutre Oreilles Ojibwe Community College.

Thaís Passos Fonseca has worked on milk quality, milking machines and training programs for dairy farmers and workers in Brazil. She got her Master's degree in Agroecology at UW-Madison, and now she is a PhD candidate in the Environment & Resources program. She is a team member of the Green Cheese project, building life cycle assessment models to evaluate the energy, greenhouse gas, and nutrients balance in Wisconsin dairy and bio-energy industries.

Jennifer Phillips is a master’s student in the Environment & Resources program in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. She is advised by Galen McKinley in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.  Her research investigates the likely ecological, chemical, and physical effects of carbon acidification on the Great Lakes. She is hoping to apply what we know about ocean acidification (the 'other CO2 problem') and freshwater carbonate chemistry to encourage research and high-quality monitoring of the Great Lakes. In addition to modeling, she will gather data on the likely ecological impacts from acidification through expert elicitation and, in doing so, develop a more comprehensive assessment on native and invasive species' pH tolerance and sensitivity.
She is from New Paltz, New York and earned a B.S. in Biology & Society from Cornell University in May 2009. In her free time, she tries to spend as much time as possible outside -- either running, biking, rowing, or playing volleyball and has hopes of becoming a triathlete and fluent in Spanish. 

Roland Wang is a Master's degree student in the Water Resources Management program at the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He is interested in public participation in regards to managing aquatic invasive species, particularly in the Great Lakes. Specifically, Roland is interested in the communicative tools to engage the public in management practices. Roland graduated from Cornell University in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science, double major in Natural Resources and Development Sociology.

Kyana Young (Fellow) is a first-year PhD student in Environmental Engineering and a NSF CHANGE Fellow. She is advised by Dr Gregory Harrington, whose research interests include removal and inactivation of waterborne pathogens during drinking water treatment and distribution. She is broadly interested in the engineering of water quality/water treatment processes, as well as challenges in making these processes accessible to developing countries.

Kyana graduated from the University of Arizona’s Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. She has conducted water quality/water treatment research at The University of Arizona, The University of Hong Kong, The University of Massachusetts – Amherst, and Drexel University.

Kyana is also a Fellow in the Graduate Engineering Research Scholars Program at UW-Madison.

Cohort 2009

Vijay Limaye (Fellow) is a joint PhD student in the Population Health Sciences and Environment and Resources programs.  He works at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) and is advised by Dr. Jonathan Patz.

Vijay graduated from UC-Berkeley in 2007, majoring in Environmental Sciences and completing a minor in Spanish Language and Literature.  Through his coursework at Berkeley and research experiences in isotopic geochemistry, soil respiration, and water quality, Vijay became interested in the scientific and political challenges of global environmental problems.  Upon graduation, he worked at the US EPA regional office in San Francisco on Clean Water Act programs for Native American tribes.  As part of his work as an Environmental Scientist, Vijay helped develop new reporting methods to document tribal water quality and demonstrate the efficacy of federal grants.  Inspired by these academic and professional experiences, Vijay is interested in interdisciplinary research exploring the human health consequences of climate change for populations in America and India.

At UW-Madison, Vijay studies environmental epidemiology, particularly the links between energy use, climate, air quality, and public health.  This research is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (CHANGE-IGERT), the Department of Education through UW-Madison's Center for South Asia (Foreign Language and Area Studies - Hindi), the National Institutes of Health, and the Joint Indo-US Science and Technology Forum.  After completing his degree, he plans to apply this work to promote public health and sustainable development abroad.

Outside of school, Vijay enjoys sailing, photography and travel to places both near and far.

Jessica Long (Fellow) is working towards a Master’s degree in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development with the Nelson Institute. She is broadly interested in conservation strategies and their effects on local human and natural communities and currently focuses on the establishment of protected areas near indigenous villages in the Peruvian Amazon. Jess is especially intrigued by multi-scale and multi-dimensional analysis of factors and outcomes of conservation-development projects. She would like to explore links between ways of describing hopes of different stakeholders and actual change toward or away from those goals using GIS and modeling techniques, ethnographic studies, and inquiry from a political ecology stance.

Jess hails from North Carolina and she spends her free time trying to cram her life more full of natural history, adventuring, and anything home-made.

Marc Mayes (Fellow) is an M.S. Candidate in the Nelson Institute's Environment and Resources program. Broadly, Marc is interested in the environmental impacts of regional and global land cover/land use change, and relationships between spatial patterns of land development and water and energy use. He enjoys using a wide range of tools to study environmental problems, from satellite remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to organic geochemistry. Initially, his research at SAGE will focus on developing new methods for classifying and quantifying land cover change in urban and peri-urban environments in the US and China using LANDSAT and hyperspectral imagery and census statistics. He hopes to connect his research to other questions on the coupled impacts of climate and land cover change on human health and the health of aquatic ecosystems.

Marc also enjoys science writing. A student member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), he has written for a range of publications and pursued research on integrating the teaching of writing and communication skills into undergraduate science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) classes.

For his undergraduate studies, Marc attended Brown University in Providence, RI, earning a Geology-Chemistry ScB. in May 2009. Since 2006, he has been working with Dr. James Russell on paleolimnology research in numerous lakes throughout East Africa. As part of his senior thesis, Marc constructed new lake surface temperature, precipitation and monsoon wind strength records for Lake Tanganyika and used them to study the relationships between lake surface temperature and wind strength on pelagic productivity. He is a proud alumnus of The Nyanza Project, a ten-year effort to study the climate history and limnology of Lake Tanganyika. In addition, Marc worked as a Writing Fellow for classes in Geological Sciences, History, Environmental Studies and Engineering.

When he is not working, Marc enjoys cycling, running, swimming and volunteering. He is also a musician. He plays piano and saxophones, and likes classical, jazz, funk, folk and bluegrass.

Aleia McCord (Fellow) is a first year graduate student in the Environment & Resources program, where she is co-advised by Dr. Tony Goldberg and Dr. Jonathan Patz. She is broadly interested in environmental public health. Specifically, Aleia hopes to study how land use change affects zoonotic disease emergence and distribution in sub-Saharan Africa.

Melissa Motew (Fellow) While my academic and professional background is in physics and technology research, my goal as a graduate student has been to apply my technical skills to solving complex environmental issues. Prior to coming to the UW in 2009 I spent six years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and before that obtained a BS in physics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  Currently I am a student in the Environment and Resources program in the Nelson Institute, and my research home is at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE). 

In general my research investigates how drivers of change, such as climate and land use, affect ecosystems in the Midwest US.  For my masters degree I have looked at the impact of recent climate change on the structure and functioning of natural vegetation ecosystems across the upper Midwest.  For my PhD, I will be collaborating on an interdisciplinary study focused on the Yahara watershed here in Dane County. This work will consider a more diverse array of ecosystem types including agricultural and hydrological systems.  My primary research tool is the Agro-IBIS Dynamic Global Vegetation Model, developed here at SAGE. 

Steve Plachinski (Fellow) is a M.S. student in Environment and Resources. His work focuses on the connections between the environment and human livelihood, specifically the intersection of air quality, climate change, and energy use. In addition to his participation in the CHANGE program, he also is enrolled in the Air Resources Management (ARM) certificate from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

Steve's research explores the role of air quality modeling in energy and climate change policy through two interrelated projects utilizing the Community Multi-Scale Air Quality Model (CMAQ). First, he uses this model and ozone/meteorology observation data to examine the impact of climate change on ground-level ozone. Second, he seeks to quantify the air quality impact of future energy use policies and trends using CMAQ and a variety of pollution emission scenarios. His work connects atmospheric science, civil and environmental engineering, environmental economics and policy, and environmental health.

In 2008, Steve received his B.S. in Applied Physics with minors in mathematics and theology from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Jeffrey Starke received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) in May of 2011. He currently serves on the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point as an Academy Professor. His general research interests are focused on drinking water treatment processes used to protect public health and renewable energy resources at the water/energy nexus. Jeff completed his Master of Science degree from UW-Madison in 2001. His thesis researched the inactivation of Cryptosporidium parvum using chlorine in drinking water systems.  

In his spare time, Jeff actively participates in his sons' lives by coaching youth sports and working with the Boy Scouts. Jeff is also active with several student organizations at West Point to include Engineers Without Borders and Green Think (a student led environmental "think tank" focusing on community issues of sustainability).

Sarah Stefanos (Fellow) is in the first year of her PhD program in Environment andResources at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Under advisors Samer Alatout (Sociology) and Gregg Mitman (History of Science, Medicine and Technology), Sarah's will employ sociological, historical and legal approaches to examine transnational large-scale land acquisition (popularly known as "land grabbing") in developing countries. More broadly, she is interested in human-environment interactions; environmental and land history, particularly in Africa; rural sociology; agricultural, institutional and energy economics; theories of borders, sovereignty and state; colonialism; indigenous peoples; international law and transnational institutions; migration and refugee studies; human rights; land tenure and property rights; climate change and climate change impacts in the developing world and renewable energy resources.

In 2008, Sarah earned an MA in International Human Rights Law and a Graduate Certificate in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies from the American University in Cairo. She obtained her B.S. in Molecular Environmental Biology from UC Berkeley in 2004.

Cohort 2008

CHANGE retreat: September 6-7 2008. click photo for larger image

Maggie Grabow is a Ph.D. candidate in Environment & Resources in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies with a certificate in the Certificate on Humans and the Global Environment (CHANGE). Advised by Dr. Jonathan Patz in the Center for Sustainability and Global Health, her general research interests include how the built environment and climate change affects health.

Maggie recently completed her Master of Public Health in December of 2010, conducting research on two ancillary studies at the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Assessment of the Social and Built Environment (WASABE), and the Assessment of the Nutritional Environment of Wisconsin Communities (ANEWC).

Maggie completed her Master of Science degree in the fall of 2007. In her thesis, she researched the impacts of increased bicycling and reduced car travel in Madison, and the impact on personal fitness and human health, local air pollution and human health, and greenhouse gas mitigation/climate change. After completing her thesis, she spent the year contributing to an EPA STAR investigation while broadening the scope of this project by looking at the impacts of bicycling in the ten largest cities in the Midwest.

Micah Hahn (Fellow) is a joint degree Ph.D. candidate in Environment & Resources and Population Health Sciences and a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellow at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) where she is advised by Jonathan Patz. Micah is broadly interested in global environmental change and the epidemiology and ecological distribution of infectious disease. She is drawn to the field of Conservation Medicine and the role of zoonotics in the disease transmission cycle as well as the impact of large-scale environmental and social disturbances such as deforestation and natural disasters on infectious disease.

Micah completed her MPH in Global Environmental Health at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University where her research focused on designing a method for quantifying climate change vulnerability at the local level in Mozambique. Micah created a climate vulnerability index to rank surveyed communities to assist the international humanitarian organization, CARE, design programming that addresses the specific vulnerabilities within each community. Micah also worked on the Water Team at CARE helping shape the Water Team Climate Change Strategy and integrate adaptation, ecosystem protection, and risk management into new water projects in East Africa.

Micah received a B.A. in Biology from Brandeis University. As an undergraduate, Micah spent time working at an eye clinic in Orissa, India and studying abroad in Kenya. These experiences lead her down the path of international public health, and her love for the great outdoors and the challenge of trying to solve really hard problems soon drew her to global environmental health issues.

Her dissertation topic focuses on land use and forest composition effects on the epidemiology of malaria in the Brazilian Amazon and Nipah Virus in Bangladesh.

In her time outside of SAGE, Micah enjoys working for F.H. King Students for Sustainable Agriculture, backpacking, biking, playing soccer, scouring flea markets and thrift stores, trying new fermentation and canning experiments, traveling to far off places, and enjoying all that Madison has to offer.

Dadit Hidayat is joining the CHANGE program with an urban planning background focusing in transportation planning. Dadi's research interests have been the study of the why, where, and how questions related to people's day-to-day travel decisions and actions. In addition to traditional transportation approaches within travel behavior study-examining the common patterns of travel behavior, the prediction, and the impact on the urban system, he is also intrigued by people's social dynamics in making travel's decisions. Thus, he considers travel behavior study as both means and ends. The former is related to providing information for devising necessary transportation policy, while the latter approach is related to understanding people's challenges in making transportation's action. Both approaches are used in Dadit's research in framing issues on environmentally sustainable transport.

Dadit is currently a doctoral student at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, in the Environment and Resources program. His broad interests fall in the area of sustainability, in particular, the socio-cultural dynamics of community in understanding and implementing sustainable practices in day-to-day lives. He holds a B.S. degree in Architecture and an M.S. degree in Urban and Regional Planning.

Cheng Ji is a 1st year graduate student in Nelson Institute, Water Resource Management program. Her Bachelor's Degree is in environmental engineering. She is interested in environmental planning and energy analysis. She's also interested in environmental issues in developing countries. During her undergraduate she was focused on waste water treatment and solid waste management.

Minhye Park is a joint degree Masters' student in the La Follette school of Public Affairs and the department of Urban and Regional Planning. She is interested in how to make formerly unthought-of environmental risks more visible in the process of development planning. Given the lack of integration of development planning and environmental risk reduction on both the global and local levels in terms of policy making, she hopes to bridge this widening divide between academic perception and actual policy implementation.

Jessica Price (Fellow) received her M.S. in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development in May 2010, and is continuing in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies in pursuit of a Ph.D. in Environment and Resources under the guidance of her advisor, Janet Silbernagel. Her research interests center on the potential effects of climate change and resource demand on biodiversity and ecological functions (especially ecosystem goods and services) in forest ecosystems.

In a collaborative project with The Nature Conservancy, Jessica is working with local and regional experts to build and model landscape scenarios to evaluate the effectiveness of various conservation strategies under resource demand and climate change pressures. The project focuses on two forest ecosystems—the Wild Rivers Legacy Forest in northeastern Wisconsin and the Two Hearted River watershed in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Ultimately, the aims of this approach are two-fold: 1) to enable conservation practitioners and decision-makers to compare the potential outcomes of different conservation strategies and make informed decisions about how to best utilize scarce financial resources and reduce the risks associated with the implementation of innovative strategies, and 2) to foster trust among the diverse organizations at work on these landscapes and set the stage for their continued cooperative conservation planning and management.

Jessica is currently a Student Representative of the US-IALE (U.S. Regional Association of the International Association for Landscape Ecology), a member of the Society for Conservation Biology, and a former Doris Duke Conservation Fellow. Before arriving in Madison, Jessica worked as a science writer and editor at the University of Chicago and as Assistant to the Director of the Tongass Conservation Society in Ketchikan, Alaska. She received her B.A. in Biology and Art History from Lake Forest College in 2002. In her free time, Jessica enjoys knitting, cooking, hiking, creative writing, and photography.

Chelsea Schelly (Fellow) is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. She is inspired by the belief that the technological systems societies use to sustain residential life have important implications for how humans conceive of their relationship to the natural world. Her work seeks to understand how technological systems interact with social structures to shape human conceptions of nature, human-nature relationships, and human action. It examines the historical normalization of residential technological systems in America and the ways in which alternative technological systems challenge the political, economic, and environmental consequences of those systems. Her current research (which is also funded by an EPA-STAR Fellowship) explores the structural relationships shaping current technology use, how individuals choose to pursue alternative dwelling technologies, and how that choice reflects broader attitudes, opinions, and lifestyles. Her research and teaching interests include environmental sociology, science and technology studies, and social theory.

Andrew Stuhl (Fellow) works at the intersection of environmental studies, environmental history, and history of science, asking what human and natural histories can offer to addressing today's socio-ecological issues. His research interests include natural and cultural resource management in the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of history in decision-making, leadership studies, and environmental education.

His dissertation project aims to contextualize current discourses around adaptation to climate change in the Arctic through a historical investigation of the relationships among commerce, knowledge, nationalism, and environmental change in Alaska and northern Canada.  This research will focus on encounters among Inuit in the Western Arctic with scientists, entrepreneurs, and administrators in previous cases of ecological and social crisis.  These include the dramatic decline in whale populations during the rise of American Empire at the turn of the twentieth century; the political economy of wildlife and business cycles in the post-Depression North American fur trade; and the multinational effort to erect a scientific and administrative infrastructure capable of protecting oil and democracy in the global North after WWII.  Ultimately, he hopes this project will help situate discussions of sovereignty, economic security, and global warming in the Arctic. 

Melissa Whited is a PhD student in Environment & Resources (having completed her MS in E&R in August 2010). She researches water economics and policy, a topic she became interested in while growing up on a ranch in a semi-arid region of Texas. Melissa's Master's thesis explored indirect economic impacts of a groundwater market on rural communities dependent on irrigated agriculture. During her Master's studies, she also helped develop water conservation programs at the Wisconsin Public Service Commission.

Currently Melissa's primary interests lie in the areas where energy, water, community development, and economics overlap, such as the trade of "virtual water" and conservation incentive programs.

Cohort 2007

Caitlin Littlefield's research interests are human-environment interactions emphasizing risk perception, decision-making, and policy: What motivates people to respond to environmental change? How does environmental science influence individual's decisions and reactions? How effective is top-down control (e.g. governmental regulation) compared with individual risk and response? Her current work is on an EPA funded project modeling atmospheric mercury in the Great Lakes region using the Community Muiti-Scale Air Quality Model (CMAQ). The results will be compared with field observations and at a later stage future climate scenarios will be put into the model to assess possible effects on mercury deposition. The ultimate aim is to inform mercury emissions policy and work towards a better understanding of atmospheric mercury chemistry.

Erin Madden (Fellow) is a PhD student in Community and Environmental Sociology. Her Master’s research explores how the US-Mexico border wall impacts the local social and natural environment of Brownsville, Texas. She uses qualitative approaches (mainly interviews and participant observation) to understand how residents of Brownsville feel about the wall’s presence in their community. Themes emerging from this project include racism, immigration, agricultural and other private land use rights, national security, and environmental justice. She has visited Brownsville twice to conduct interviews and start relationships with people in the community and plans to continue and expand this research for her dissertation. She is interested in perhaps adding other sites in the US-Mexico border region, especially areas located in Mexico.

Abigail Popp (Fellow) is a graduate student in the department of Geography as well as a fellow in the CHANGE (Certificate on Humans and the Global Environment) program. She is interested in the dynamics of socio-ecological systems in the context of water management in arid regions. She is curious about the ways in which socio-cultural processes mediate environmental management decisions and how western “scientific” ecological understanding can be blended with a political ecology approach to assess vulnerability and resilience of socio-ecological systems.

Anne Shudy Palmer is pursuing an M.S. in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development and the Certificate on Humans and the Global Environment (CHANGE). Her research project is a partnership between SAGE, Madison Gas & Electric, and 1000 Friends of Wisconsin to create a locally focused, collaborative climate protection web site that will allow individuals to measure, track, and collaborate to reduce their carbon footprints.

Anne graduated from UW-Madison in 2002 with a B.S. in math and communication arts and a certificate in environmental studies. She worked as a technical writer for four years at Epic Systems Corporation, a local healthcare software company, before returning to school.

Outside of school, Anne loves soccer, reading, and trying to garden.

Megan Raby (Fellow) believes that appreciating the historical, socially embedded nature of science is necessary in order to understand changing relationships between humans and the environment. Her research interests center on the role of place in shaping scientific knowledge as well as the intersection between the history of science and environmental history. She is currently working on a dissertation on US tropical biology in the Caribbean after 1898. This dissertation will focus on US tropical research stations, such as Harvard's Botanical Station for Tropical Research and Sugarcane Investigation, Cuba, and the Canal Zone Biological Area at Barro Colorado Island, Panama.  She is particularly interested in the international relations of science in the Caribbean as US biologists moved from utilizing the existing networks of European colonial science toward developing their own, with the aid of US corporations,  after the Spanish American War and construction of the Panama Canal.  She is also concerned with how tropical field stations brought together researchers from an array of biological disciplines, and may have fostered the development of what we would today call "biodiversity studies." www.meganraby.com

Nina Chaopricha is a PhD student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies' Environment & Resources program studying soil carbon science and policy.  In the lab, she examines how organic matter was stabilized in the 10,000-year-old Brady Soil from the central Great Plains and how much carbon will be released as this soil is eroded and exposed.