Barbour, Michael
Professor
Michael Barbour, professor, plant sciences, is a plant ecologist with 35 years of data describing the California landscape, particularly coastal sand dune scrub, central valley vernal pools, mixed evergreen forest in the Coast Ranges, and high elevation red fir forest in the Sierra Nevada. He has studied on the Lake Tahoe watershed, eastern Merced County and worked on CALFED programs. He teaches plant ecology, California vegetation, forest ecology and fire ecology.
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Beamish, Thomas D.
Associate Professor
Thomas D. Beamish, associate professor, sociology, conducts research in organizations, institutions, and economy; and environment and technology. These reflect a general and substantive interest in the structuring influence that institutions and complex formal and informal organizations exert on interpretation and practice. As they specifically relate to the environment, Beamish has sought to understand social and cultural constructions of the environment; environmental hazards, natural disaster response, and risk perception; community and social movements; and innovation in green designs and their technology. Through field work in a diverse range of settings from oil fields and industry, to commercial construction sites and markets, and to anti-war and anti-technology protests, he has sought to illuminate the role social structures and social expectations play in configuring individual rationality and decision making. Beamish is currently associated with the National Science Foundation funded UC Davis IGERT program as a graduate trainer and is collaborating on a new JMIE project in environmental justice. He teaches undergraduate environmental sociology, collective behavior and collective action, research traditions and methods, and sociology of organizations. Graduate courses include sociopolitical ecology, sociology of organizations and managing innovation and organizational change.
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Berry, Alison M.
Professor
Alison Berry, professor, environmental horticulture, focuses her research on the biology and applications of nitrogen fixation. She is assessing legume cover crops as sources of fertilizer in orchards and vineyards, nitrogen fixers in natural ecosystems, and urban impacts on soil processes. Ongoing investigations are concerned with the development and function of nitrogen-fixing root nodules.
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Dorf, Richard C.
Professor
Richard C. Dorf, director, MBA Consulting Center, UC Davis Graduate School of Management, teaches entrepreneurship, innovation, nonprofit, venture and technology management. Two of 30 published books during his career pertain to sustainable business development: Technology, Humans, and Society: Towards a Sustainable World (2001); and Technology Ventures: From Idea to Opportunity (2005), coauthored with Professor Tom Byers of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. The later is a bestseller at engineering schools and engineering management programs in business schools. He has taught courses in the GSM entitled “Sustainable and Responsible Business” and “New and Small Business Ventures.” Dorf is professor emeritus of management and electrical and computer engineering at UC Davis.
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Elliott-Fisk, Deborah L.
Professor
Deborah. L. Elliott-Fisk, professor, wildlife, fish and conservation biology; focuses on quaternary environmental change, including past and future change, targeted at understanding ecosystem processes and restoration of damaged ecosystems. She also has experience working in Arctic, alpine, montane forest, desert and coastal environments across North America.
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Elmendorf, Christopher S.
Christopher S. Elmendorf, acting professor of law, UC Davis School of Law, is interested in how property institutions may support (or retard) the stewardship of ecological resources. He worked on private lands conservation prior to attending law school and has published in this area.
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Eviner, Valerie
Assistant Professor
Valerie Eviner, assistant professor, plant sciences, applies her mechanistic understanding of plant-soil interactions to better understand and develop more effective management of various ecosystems. Her areas of interest include invasive species, habitat restoration, biogeochemical cycling, plant and plant-soil interactions, grazing and rangeland systems, sustainable agriculture, and global environmental change.
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Farzin, Hossein
Professor
Hossein Farzin, professor, agricultural and resource economics, specializes in the Middle East. A former economist and consultant for the World Bank, Farzin advised Kuwait, Iran and the United Arab Emirates on their economies. He sees institutionalized democracy as the most valuable social, economic and political capital asset for the Middle East. He is an expert on the role that the world’s stakeholders, particularly the United States, has in supporting and helping the people of the Middle East nations to establish democratic institutions.
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Florsheim, Joan
Joan Florsheim, associate research geologist, geology, studies fluvial geomorphology and earth surface processes. Her research includes field investigations in fluvial systems in the Central Valley and in North Coastal California, looking at floodplain processes and topography at intentional levee breaches for riparian restoration, the effect of anthropogenic disturbances on anastomosing rivers, effect of baselevel change on floodplain-fan sediment storage and channel morphology, and effect of land uses on sediment budgets and aquatic habitat. Other research interests include hillslope, watershed, estuarine and tidal wetland processes; influences of wildfire on geomorphic and hydrologic processes; ecology; and applied geomorphology.
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Fogg, Graham
Professor
Graham Fogg has more than 30 yrs experience researching and teaching about subsurface water flow and pollutant transport processes and water resource sustainability. Graham’s research interests include characterization and modeling of subsurface complexity, contaminant transport, groundwater quality sustainability, response of hydrologic systems to climate change, and hydrogeologic processes in ecosystems, among others. He teaches courses at UC Davis in groundwater hydrology, groundwater modeling, applied geostatistics, and water resources.
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Francis, Mark
Professor
Mark Francis, professor, landscape architecture and environmental design, teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in landscape meaning, public space, landscape theory and urban design. His research and design work is focused on urban and community landscapes.
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Galt, Ryan E.
Assistant Professor
Ryan E. Galt, assistant professor, human and community development, focuses on the relationships between agriculture, society, and the environment. Specific interests and expertise include pesticide politics, globalization and localization of food, conservation in agriculture, and the social and environmental effects of market requirements.
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Grismer, Mark E.
Professor
Mark Grismer, professor; land, air and water resources; and biological and agricultural engineering; is interested in water movement in the watershed and shallow subsurface and associated water quality problems. He also researches infiltration, runoff and erosion and multi-phase transport in soils, water quality in wetland systems, and environmental ethics.
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Handy, Susan
Associate Professor
Susan Handy, associate professor, environmental science and policy, studies the relationship between neighborhood design and travel behavior, non-work travel behavior, automobile dependence and transportation planning practice. She is a member of the Committee on Transportation and Land Development and the Committee on Women’s Transportation Issues of the U.S. Transportation Research Board.
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Hargadon, Andrew B.
Associate Professor
Andrew B. Hargadon, associate professor, Graduate School of Management, has research interests in the management of new product development, innovation, organizational knowledge flow and organizational and social factors in the design of technology.
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Howitt, Richard
Professor
Richard Howitt, professor, agricultural economics, develops economic models with agricultural and environmental policy implications that test fundamental properties of the system. His policy models reproduce observed resource uses to forecast the response of those users to changes in price, regulation, or the physical resource dynamics. To estimate more meaningful analyses than is possible with economic surveys, he models the economic structure of farming and land use using remote sensing and other sources of disaggregated data to infer the underlying economic functions facing the resource manager. His empirical dynamic stochastic methods can be used to analyze the switch in investments and changes in institutions subject to dynamic stochastic inputs and irreversible costs or decisions.
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Jackson, Louise E.
Professor
Louise E. Jackson, professor and extension specialist, studies soil and root ecology in agricultural and grassland ecosystems. Her research is improving understanding of ecological processes that control nutrient cycling, microbial community composition, and plant growth and diversity along management and disturbance gradients. Her goals are to develop environmentally-sound management practices for increased sustainability, soil quality, and biodiversity in agricultural and grassland ecosystems in California. Some of her research topic areas include soil-plant nitrogen and carbon flows mediated by microbial and plant processes, soil microbial composition and activity, comparison between soils and vegetation along land use gradients, plant nitrogen and water uptake, and root architecture. Her focus is on vegetable crop systems and on the comparison of soil processes between intensively-farmed vegetable crop systems and neighboring grassland ecosystems. Much of her work is on organic farms, or farms that are making the transition to organic production. She has also been active in agricultural adaptation to climate change.
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Jassby, Alan
Professional Researcher Emeritus
Alan Jassby, research ecologist, environmental science and policy, is conducting research on understanding year-to-year and longer-term change in aquatic ecosystems, which arise primarily from anthropogenic influences, climate, species dispersal and internal dynamics. Occasionally this research extends into time-series modeling for validating understanding and forecasting.
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Kelman, Ari
Associate Professor
Ari Kelman, associate professor, history, specializes in the United States’s built environment. Kelman’s first book, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize in 2004. Kelman has written extensively on the environmental history of American cities, Hurricane Katrina and other disasters, and the intersection of nature and public space. Kelman is currently working on a project about the politics of memory surrounding the Sand Creek Massacre.
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Knittel, Christopher R.
Associate Professor
Christopher Knittel is an associate professor in the department of economics, the policy and business stategy leader for the Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways program in the Institute of Transportation Studies and faculty associate at the University of California Energy Institute. His research focuses on environmental economics and regulation, in particular how industry structure affects optimal regulatory mechanisms.
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Largier, John
Professor
John Largier, associate professor, Bodega Bay Marine Lab, conducts research in coastal oceanography and ecology, specifically field-based study of water motion and the associated transport of water-borne material. This includes oceanographic study of bays in upwelling regions, small "west coast" estuaries characterized by arid summers, bar-built mouths and pulsed winter inflow, and outflow from rivers, shoaling internal tides, and wind/wave-driven flows. His interests include larval/juvenile dispersal, coastal water quality and primary productivity, including harmful algal blooms. His goal is to better understand coastal ocean systems by obtaining an integrated view of how the components, processes, and scales fit together.
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Larson, Douglas M.
Professor
Douglas M. Larson, professor, agricultural and resource economics, is involved in the valuation of water quality improvements. This includes development of the Beneficial Use Values Database, an on-line relational database that provides information on the economic values of water in its different beneficial uses; household surveys of willingness to pay by California citizens to remove impairments to water quality in lakes, rivers, streams, coastal and estuarine areas; and surveys of beach recreation and water quality valuation in San Diego County. He explored ways to estimate shadow values of time and other scarce resources for people based on their behavior and on their responses to surveys and has shown how multiple shadow values for different activities can be estimated for an individual, based on survey data. His interest in fisheries management and policy grew out of his recent service on the Scientific and Statistical Committee of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.
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Lin, C.-Y. Cynthia
Assistant Professor
C.-Y. Cynthia Lin is assistant professor in Agricultural and Resource Economics and in Environmental Science and Policy. As an economist with a background in both the natural sciences and the social sciences she is interested in issues related to energy, the environment and natural resources. At Harvard she pursued a multidisciplinary major in environmental science and public policy and wrote a thesis in atmospheric chemistry that culminated in two peer-reviewed journal publications. She then completed a Ph.D. in economics and took her field exams in industrial organization and microeconomic theory (game theory and contract theory). She is one of seven economists selected to serve on the California State Controller’s Council of Economic Advisors. She also serves as Fossil Fuels Tract Director of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies' Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways Program.
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Loge, Frank
Associate Professor
Frank Loge, associate professor, civil and environmental engineering, has research interests in water and wastewater treatment, water reuse, small and decentralized waste treatment, human and ecological risk assessment, and the dynamics of disease transmission in aquatic environments.
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London, Jonathan K.
Assistant Professor
Jonathan K. London studies rural development, community-based natural resource management; environmental justice; and regional planning, participatory research and planning and environmental education (K-12).
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Loux, Jeff
Continuing Education Specialist
Jeff Loux, assistant adjunct professor, landscape architecture; and director, Land Use and Natural Resource Program, UC Davis Extension; has 20 years of experience in the public and private sector, as well as teaching undergraduate courses in environmental science and policy and professional courses in community planning and design. He teaches conflict resolution and interest based negotiation, and serves as mediator for the award-winning Water Forum, a 40-member stakeholder collaborative that is implementing a plan to balance water needs with water resources from the American River watershed through 2030. He is a member of the prestigious California Planner’s Roundtable, a group of 30 distinguished professionals from around the State who address pressing planning and community development issues. His authored a chapter for the CA Office of Planning and Research General Plan Guidelines addressing water in community plans; two recent books, Water and Land Use: Planning Wisely for California’s Future, (2004) and The Open Space and Land Conservation Handbook (2006); and text for several CA statutes including AB 857 addressing smart growth principles.
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Lubell, Mark
Associate Professor
Mark Lubell, assistant professor, environmental science and policy, conducts research on human behavior and the role of governance institutions in solving collective action problems and facilitating cooperation. Projects include watershed management, environmental activism, agricultural best management practices, and institutional change in local governments.
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Lund, Jay R.
Professor
Jay Lund, professor, civil and environmental engineering, is an expert on water policy, management, and engineering. He has helped lead development and application of California Value Integrated Network (CALVIN), a computer model that analyzes state water supplies and delivery systems and projects impacts of changes in the system's management as well as other applications of engineering and economic modeling to water problems in California and elsewhere. Recent studies have included examinations of water management and economic adaptations to prolonged drought, removal of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and levee failures and water supply options within the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta and its watershed.
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Luoma, Samuel
Sam Luoma is working on science-policy interactions at the John Muir Institute of the Environment. A recognized authority on the San Francisco Bay for 35 years, he advises policymakers on sediment quality, bioavailability of contaminants in soils and sediments, mining issues, selenium issues, environmental monitoring and environmental implications of nanomaterials. His research involves chemical contamination in rivers and estuaries, with specific expertise in fate, bioavailability and effects of metals and nanometallo-products. Sam was the first Lead Scientist for the California Water Authority, an innovative program of environmental restoration of over 40% of California's watersheds and water management issues for 60% of California's water supply. Sam is editor-in-chief of San Francisco Estuary & Watershed Science, Scientific Associate with The Natural History Museum in London UK, W. J. Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in 2004 and senior research hydrologist with the US Geological Survey for 33 years.
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Marino, Miguel A.
Professor
Miguel A. Marino is distinguished professor, land, air and water resources; civil and environmental engineering; and biological and agricultural engineering. He is researching groundwater modeling, contamination, and management. He investigates conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater and hydrologic systems analysis and is interested in water resource planning and irrigation management.
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McCoy, Mike
Academic Administrator
Mike McCoy, academic administrator, Information Center for the Environment, serves as principal investigator, co-principal investigator for contracts and grants involving the development aggregation and dissemination of environmental information. In this capacity he works with a variety of agencies, committees and funding sources and works to achieve consensus on the best strategies for integrating data and implementing strategy. Projects include studies of species distribution, impaired water bodies, land use and infrastructure planning policy, and data aggregation and distribution problems.
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Mokhtarian, Patricia L.
Professor
Patricia L. Mokhtarian, professor, civil & environmental engineering, investigates and models travel behavior using methods in multivariate statistical and econometric analysis. She has investigated the impact of telecommunications on travel, land use impacts on transportation, traveler responses to traffic congestion, and adoption of new technologies. She teaches probability, statistics and survey design, particularly for discrete choice modeling.
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Mount, Jeffrey F.
Professor
Jeffrey Mount, professor, geology, and the Roy J. Shlemon Chair in Applied Geosciences, is a watershed expert specializing in the rivers of California and land-use impacts on rivers and streams. He studies the natural function of variable rainfall and snowfall in watersheds and floodplains, levee safety and future flood risks. His frequently quoted message to residents and policy-makers in California is that costly levees, channels and dams, are in conflict with the natural behaviors of rivers. Mount suggests that it is cheaper, safer and more environmentally sustainable to adapt to a river, than to force it to adapt to us. Mount is founding director of the Center for Watershed Sciences, in the John Muir Institute of the Environment, and conducts research in the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Flinders Range in South Australia. He studies floodplains, floodplain restoration methods and development of ecosystem models for environmental monitoring.
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Niemeier, Deb
Professor
Deb Niemeier is professor, civil and environmental engineering, and director, UC Davis-Caltrans Air Quality Project. She uses geographic information systems and advanced methods of analysis to investigate vehicle emissions and other transportation impacts. Her research includes data collection for environmental justice assessment using statistical modeling.
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Quinn, James F.
Professor
James F Quinn, professor, environmental science and policy is co-director of the Information Center for the Environment and leader of the California Information Node of the National Biological Information Infrastructure. His program collaborates with multiple public agencies and conservation organizations to develop information systems applicable to public environmental policy and ecological research. Current grants and research projects include the using geospatial information systems and models to predict changes in biodiversity, land use, and water quality, in the context of upcoming transportation changes and urban sprawl, international databases and information sharing on invasive species and species in protected areas, watershed and floodplain restoration in the the San Francisco Bay – Sacramento Delta ecosystem, and environmental applications of Semantic Web technologies. Past research programs also include work on marine intertidal communities, Pacific Coast marine fisheries, marine protected areas, and conservation biology as applied to parks and nature preserves. Professor Quinn is a member of multiple federal scientific advisory groups, co-founder and editor of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, the first free, all-electronic, open-access peer-reviewed journal published by the University of California Library System. He is author of well over 100 technical publications and holds degrees from Harvard (AB, 1973) and the University of Washington (Ph.D., 1979), and was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Davis faculty in 1981.
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Reuter, John E.
Associate Professional Researcher
John E. Reuter, associate research ecologist, environmental science and policy, has conducted research in limnology. He has studied water quality, nitrogen and phosphorus biogeochemistry, restoration of aquatic ecosystems, watershed ecology, nonpoint source pollution and control; and sources, fate and transport of MTBE.
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Richerson, Peter J.
Professor
Peter J. Richerson, professor, environmental science and policy, is applying theoretical and conceptual principles, along with methods of analysis of evolution mainly developed by evolutionary biologists to study the processes of cultural evolution. His research models the evolutionary properties of human culture and animal social learning, and the processes of gene-culture co-evolution. His recent publications used theoretical models to try to understand some of the main events in human evolution, such as the evolution of the advanced capacity for imitation (and hence cumulative cultural evolution in humans), the origins of tribal and larger scale cooperation, and the origins of agriculture. An NSF funded research group is devoted to the study of cultural evolution in laboratory scale microsocieties.
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Rogers, Deborah L.
Associate Professional Researcher
Deborah L. Rogers, formerly assistant research geneticist, UC Genetic Resources Conservation Program, is currently director of conservation science for a nonprofit environmental organization. She has studied spatial and temporal patterns of genetic variation in naturally occurring plant species—including clonal structure, family groupings, and trends that may suggest adaptations to their environment. Her research targets natural populations of forest tree species in California, including coast redwood whitebark pine, Monterey pine, and giant sequoia. She recently collaborated with plant genomicists to use their tools to initiate large-scale surveys of potentially adaptive genetic variation in sequoia sempervirens. She has frequently taught restoration genetics workshops with agency partners, focusing on the implications of climate change. She now works to inform longterm management of at-risk species in California.
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Rogers-Bennett, Laura
Associate Professional Researcher
Laura Rogers-Bennett’s research at Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory addresses processes that impact marine populations and communities and applies these to fishery management and marine conservation issues.
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Sperling, Daniel
Professor
Daniel Sperling is professor of Environmental Science and Policy and Civil and Environmental Engineering; founding director UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS-Davis); and acting director of Energy Efficiency Center. Professor Sperling is a leading international expert on transportation technology assessment, energy and environmental aspects of transportation, automobile emissions, air quality and transportation policy. Sperling has served on eleven National Academy of Science committees that issued reports on climate policy, energy efficiency, transport in China, hydrogen and fuel cell vehicles, and related topics. He was founding chair and is an emeritus member of the Alternative Transportation Fuels Committee of the U.S. Transportation Research Board. He regularly advises national and international policymakers and industry leaders on transportation technology assessment, energy and environmental aspects of transportation, and transportation policy.
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Sze, Julie
Associate Professor
Julie Sze, associate professor, American studies, is the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project in the John Muir Institute of the Environment. Her research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and community health and activism. She has published on a wide range of topics such as energy and air pollution activism; toxicity; the cultural politics of the Hummer, and on environmental justice novels and cultural production. Her book Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007) examines urban inequality, environmental justice and contemporary culture, focusing on asthma and air quality, garbage and energy policy in the age of privatization and deregulation. Sze has also worked with community-based environmental organizations in New York City and California for the past 15 years.
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Tomich, Thomas P.
Professor
Tom Tomich is founding director of the new Agricultural Sustainability Institute, inaugural holder of the WK Kellogg Chair in Sustainable Food Systems, and professor of community development, environmental science and policy at UC Davis. He also serves as director of the UC ANR statewide Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. Tomich was principal economist for the World Agroforestry Centre from 1994-2006. During that time, he worked with the ASB Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins, first in Southeast Asia and then as ASB global coordinator, based in Nairobi, Kenya, leading long-term collaborative partnerships at sites in the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia aiming to raise productivity and income of rural households without increasing deforestation or undermining essential environmental services.
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Ustin, Susan L.
Professor
Susan Ustin, professor; land, air and water resources; directs the activities of the Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing (CSTARS) which deals primarily with interpretation of remotely sensed data and GIS systems for monitoring and modeling landscape changes and forcing factors. Her research interests include remote sensing of environmental properties and landscape analysis, particularly using hyperspectral imagers; radiation interactions in plant canopies and applications to hydrological and ecological questions. She is also interested in developing new instrument tools on novel platforms, e.g., from field vehicles and robotic aircraft. The focus of this research is to better understand integrated ecological systems and how climate forcing and land use change interact and affect ecosystem functions and sustainability.
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Vosti, Stephen A.
Professor
Stephen A. Vosti, assistant adjunct professor, agricultural and resource economics, publishes on tropical deforestation, economic development, links between poverty and environment, population and climate, bioeconomic models, and environmental economics. He is also interested in biodiversity policy.
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Wheeler, Stephen M.
Assistant Professor
Stephen Wheeler, assistant professor, landscape architecture, studies theory and practice of sustainable development at various levels of planning, including local government, with an emphasis on land use, transportation, and urban design. His recent research has focused on climate change planning at several levels of government, and the evolution of built landscapes in metropolitan regions. He is a member of Community Development and Geography graduate groups, and the executive committee for the UC Davis Center for the Study of Regional Change.
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Wilen, James E.
Professor
James E. Wilen, professor, agricultural and resource economics, is researching performance of natural resource asset markets and factor distortion in regulated common property industries. His interests include energy economics; biomass utilization, recreation economics, economics of aquaculture, natural resource damage analysis, agricultural pollution, fisheries labor and markets; technical change and productivity in resource industries; economic development/natural resources; spatial models of resource use; and terrestrial and marine reserves.
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Zhang, Minghua
Associate Adjunct Professor
Minghua Zhang, associate professor; land, air and water resources; is conducting GIS database development. Her interests are in spatial analysis of groundwater leaching and surface water runoff as affected by pesticide applications in agriculture fields using GIS. She also studies integrated solute transport modeling in GIS and remote sensing satellite and aerial photography applications in precision farming.
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Ziccardi, Michael
Assistant Adjunct Professor
Michael Ziccardi is assistant adjunct professor and senior wildlife veterinarian, School of Veterinary Medicine; and director, Oiled Wildlife Care Network, Wildlife Health Center. His research involves wildlife and molecular epidemiology, diagnostic test development and validation for wildlife species, and the effects of petroleum on marine birds and mammals.
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