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

Cohort 2009

Christine Boals. Christine, C.H.M.M., has a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry and Environmental Science and dual Masters degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. She is also a Certified Hazardous Materials Manager at the Master Level. She has been an environmental consultant since she graduated from Indiana University and has worked for Heritage Remediation/ Engineering, Inc; ATC Associates, Inc.; and BT2, Inc. She presently consults for five companies in the State of Wisconsin and is the secretary of the South Central Chapter of the Federation of Environmental Technologists. Her consulting work involves Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), Clean Air Act (CAA) and Clean Water Act (CWA) permitting and compliance, Emergency Planning Community Right-to-Know (EPCRA) reporting and compliance and Environmental Impact Statements.

At Indiana University she worked for the Environmental Systems Application Center analyzing the water of Indiana's lakes and calculating a trophic index for each lake. The research was conducted for the Indiana Clean Lakes Program. She also worked in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York over one summer with a group that was studying the effects of liming on acid lakes in the area. While working on her Bachelor's degree she completed an environmental impact assessment on a major river as part of a research project.

Her hobbies include travel, hiking, cooking and spending time with her family.

Jamie Fisher. Jamie is interested in how to clearly and effectively communicate science and environmental issues to the public. As a M.A. candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a student in CHANGE, Jamie hopes to hone both her skills as a writer and her knowledge of environmental systems. Her professional interests are focused on local and regional communication. Jamie believes that talking about environmental issues in a way that people can relate to and understand is the first step in creating communities that want to work together toward solving those issues.

Vijay Limaye (Fellow). Vijay is a MS/PhD student in the Environment and Resources program at the Nelson Institute and a National Science Foundation CHANGE-IGERT Fellow. 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 with a major in Environmental Sciences and 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 hopes to develop an interdisciplinary research project exploring the consequences of climate change for the developing world.

At UW-Madison, Vijay is interested in analyzing environmental public health problems, particularly the links between environmental conditions and the spread of infectious disease and the effects of rapid urbanization on human health. 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). Jess 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). Marc 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). Aleia 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. As a Master's candidate in the Environment and Resources program and a research assistant at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, Melissa brings her background in physics and career in technology research to solving complex environmental issues. Her Master's thesis research, under the guidance of Professor Chris Kucharik, will involve dynamic vegetation modeling of the Midwest United States. This work will explore past, present and future effects of climate change on natural and managed ecosystems. By incorporating state-of-the-art climate information into the model, she hopes to understand what might be expected from ecosystems in the face of such changes and to further relate those findings to local land users.

Melissa is new to the field of environmental studies. She holds a BS in physics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and six years of field experience at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a research and development center devoted to technological innovation. A strong passion for the planet's health has inspired her to apply her background in science to problems of environmental significance.

Steve Plachinski (Fellow). Steve is a M.S. student in the Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences. 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.

Gregory Reeb. (undergraduate associate)

Mirna Santana. Mirna is a doctoral student in the Department of Soil Science, specializing in ecosystem microbiology. Her broad research interest include: below-above ground interactions (functional diversity); plant-microorganisms interactions and nutrient cycling; diversity and ecosystem function (tropical and temperate); ecology and taxonomy of fungal species; restoration ecology; environmental policies, and science writing.

Her current research projects focus on the ecology of the above-belowground interactions, particularly looking at carbon and nutrient cycling dynamics in invaded and restored wetlands. Mirna looks at the system in a holistic way. She seeks to be able to determine how plant, soil, microbes, and environmental processes interact and respond to restoration invasions and management practices.

She joined the program CHANGE to learn more about environmental assessment and policies. She seeks to work together with other researchers across-disciplines to assess pressing environmental issues.

Originally from Panama, she earned a BS in Biology/Botany at the University of Panama. In Panama she conducted research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Station, Barro Colorado. She earned a master’s degree in Biology/Ecology at the University of Puerto Rico were she was part of the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research Program group, prior to beginning doctoral work.

Jeffrey Starke, P.E. Jeffrey is a Ph.D. candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). Advised by Dr. Gregory Harrington, his general research interests are focused on drinking water treatment processes used to protect public health. 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.  Upon completion of his Masters, he served on the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He will rejoin the faculty upon completion of his Ph.D. as an Academy Professor. In his spare time, Jeff actively participates in his sons’ lives by coaching youth sports and working with the Boy Scouts of Troop 53 (McFarland).  Jeff spends a lot of time enjoying the environment while cycling the beautiful roads of Wisconsin.

Sarah Stefanos (Fellow). Sarah 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

Maggie Grabow. Maggie is a Ph.D. candidate in Energy & 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 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.

Before coming to SAGE and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Maggie received her Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, with minors in French and Legal Studies (2005). At Washington University, Maggie was a seven-time NCAA Division III Championship qualifier in cross-country and track, with four All-American Honors in track. At UW-Madison, Maggie completed her eligibility by qualifying for the NCAA Division I Championship in cross-country and indoor track.

In her spare time, Maggie enjoys running, performing West African dance, cooking, and scrap-booking.

Micah Hahn (Fellow). Micah Hahn 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. Regarding the integration of her research interests into the quickly growing climate change dialogue, Micah would like to focus on the incorporation of predictive models of infectious disease spread into policy decisions.

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.

In her time outside of SAGE, Micah enjoys backpacking, biking, playing soccer, learning to windsurf and sail, scouring flea markets and thrift stores, photography, traveling to far off places, and enjoying all that Madison has to offer.

Dadit Hidayat. 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. Cheng 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. Minhye 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. Jessica is pursuing a M.S. in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development through the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and a certificate in CHANGE.  Her research interests center on the links between biodiversity and ecological functions (especially ecosystem goods and services) in forest ecosystems.  She is especially interested in the potential effects of climate change and resource demand on biodiversity and persistence of endangered species as well as ecosystem composition, structure, and function.  Her M.S. study focuses on apply scientific research and modeling to evaluate the conservation effectiveness of various land management regimes under different climate change projections under the guidance of Professor Janet Silbernagel.  This project synthesizes both natural and social sciences to project the outcome of different management regimes on both the ecosystem health and the availability of ecosystem services, including anthropogenic land-use needs, in locations of conservation interest.  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 enoys knitting, cooking, hiking, creative writing, and photography.

Chelsea Schelly (Fellow). Chelsea is in her first year of the Ph.D. program in the Department of Sociology/Rural Sociology. Her research interests are in the field of environmental sociology, specifically in the sociology of energy and renewable energy. Her M.A. research focused on forms of participatory democracy and the best means of promoting renewable energy adoption within the Colorado utilities industry. For her dissertation, she hopes to trace the electrical current through space and time, across political and geographic boundaries, to demonstrate the power dynamics and economic institutions that shape human-environment relations with regard to energy use. Her interests are driven by a belief that how we power our lives indicates an essential element of our relationship to the natural world.

Andrew Stuhl (Fellow). Andrew tends to view socio-ecological systems through the intellectual lenses of environmental history and history of science, asking what human and natural histories can offer to solving today's environmental problems. His research interests include North American natural and cultural resource management in the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of history in decision-making, leadership studies, and environmental education.

His current dissertation project will investigate the environmental and cultural history of resource extraction in the Western Arctic to comprehend changing land-use patterns, knowledge production, and cultural conflict in the region. This research will focus on encounters among Inuvialuit natives in the Beaufort-Delta with non-native whalers, trappers, traders, and oil developers over the last two centuries. Ultimately, he hopes to gain a richer historical context of the patterns of resource extraction which will inform the path of development, conservation, and management of natural and cultural resources in the Arctic.

Melissa Whited (Fellow). As a graduate student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Melissa is interested in approaches to water resource management.  For her Master’s thesis, she plans to focus on transnational aquifers along the Mexico-Texas border and the ways in which certain interests and people are marginalized through the current policy process. Her research draws from a combination of political science, the natural sciences, feminist theory, and economics to explore questions of equity and sustainability and the ways in which borders complexify these issues.

Cohort 2007

Caitlin Littlefield. Caitlin's general 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). Erin 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). Abigail 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. Anne 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). As a historian of science, Megan 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."

Nina Trautmann Chaopricha. Nina's research focuses on sustainable development and environmental science in Yunnan Province, China. She is doing a Ph.D. in Environment & Resources through the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Her research is funded by the UW-Madison NSF IGERT China Program.