BEAHRS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- General Manager and Project Manager for the Belarusian Environmental Movement
Anastasia Zhdanovich is general manager and project manager for the Belarusian Environmental Movement, where she helps work to address issues relating to climate change, persistent organic pollutants waste, and land degradation in Belarus, often through coordination and collaboration with private sector partners. In her work, she frequently struggled with convincing small private businesses to invest in solving environmental problems. When Beahrs ELP alumnus Ming Yang, who is now Senior Climate Change Specialist at Global Environment Facility, told Anastasia about the training, she applied in the hopes that she could use the interdisciplinary seminars and professional expertise to learn how to overcome this issue.
Dick Beahrs had a 35-year career as a media executive with Time Warner. During that time, he served as the President of Court TV and the Comedy Channel, which evolved into Comedy Central. He also served as the head of New Business Development for HBO, where he oversaw the launch of Cinemax. As the Director of Sports Illustrated Enterprises, he also managed the development of ancillary businesses for the magazine.
In 2001, he and his wife Carolyn funded the launch of the Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program at UC Berkeley. This multidisciplinary program has trained over 500 environmental professionals from over 100 countries in sustainable development skills.
Beahrs served on the UN Hunger Task Force as part of the Millennium Development Goals Initiative. He is currently focused on efforts to enhance school feeding programs with locally produced foods on the African continent. He served as a trustee for the University of California, Berkeley Foundation as well as on the Advisory Boards of numerous University initiatives and programs. He has served on the Leadership Council of the Initiative for Global Development and the Boards of The School of Management at St. Petersburg University in Russia, the World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya and as Chairman of the Arbor Day Foundation. His current business activities include serving on the Board of the San Jose Giants (a minor league affiliate of the San Francisco Giants), and as a Senior Advisor to Revolution Foods.
He graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1968 where he served as the Student Body President his senior year. He and his wife Carolyn reside in Berkeley. They have four children and six grandchildren.
Job Titles:
- Science Advisor and Research Coordinator
- Service Science Advisor and Research Coordinator for the Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit
Benjamin Becker is the National Park Service Science Advisor and Research Coordinator for the Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CA-CESU) at UC Berkeley. He is also a visiting scholar in UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Previously, he worked for the National Park Service at Point Reyes National Seashore. Becker holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, an M.F.S. from Yale, as well as two BAs from UCLA.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning, College of Environmental Design
Charisma Acey is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her background includes work, research and travel to countries in West Africa, southern Africa and Central America. Her work focuses on local and regional environmental sustainability, with a focus on poverty reduction, urban governance and access to basic services. Her work relies on both quantitative and participatory, qualitative research approaches to understanding individual and household demand for improved infrastructure and environmental amenities. Current and past research projects, teaching and service learning courses have focused on addressing barriers to sustainable development such as human-environment interactions at multiple scales in urban areas around the world, poverty and participatory approaches to governance and development, the financing and sustainability of publicly provided services and utilities, local and regional food systems, environmental justice, and urbanization domestically and globally.
Recent and ongoing research includes fieldwork in Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda exploring sustainable household scale alternative energy solutions and access to basic services such as water and sanitation. She also has worked on participatory re-zoning for local healthy food systems and sustainability planning in Columbus, Ohio, and Portland, Oregon. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Professor Acey was an assistant professor of city and regional planning in the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University, with a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity where she worked on global food justice issues and mapping geographic differences in resources and opportunities at the metropolitan scale. Her background includes six years of international work as a senior manager for relief and development NGOs working in countries in West Africa, southern Africa and Central and South America. She has also served as a U.S. State Department Fellow in Malawi and an American Marshall Memorial Fellow to Europe.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director / CARE - WWF Alliance
- Executive Director of the CARE - WWF Alliance
Cheryl Margoluis is the Executive Director of the CARE-WWF Alliance. Her focus is on how to best achieve both conservation and community well-being goals through programs that integrate conservation, climate, livelihoods, and health - with a focus on women and girls. She has a PhD from the Yale School of the Environment. She is bilingual (Spanish/English), desperately trying to become trilingual (French). She also has experience in the world of education, founding a bilingual 'green' school in Central America, and as a professor of Tropical Ecology and Human Ecology for 9 years. She has spent the last 15 years living in Guatemala and Costa Rica and has recently moved back to CA with her family. She is passionate about women in conservation and supporting women throughout the world, and serves as a board member for UN Women USA SF and volunteers at her local women's shelter.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
- Professor
Dara O'Rourke is both a professor and practitioner working to improve the environmental, health, and social impacts of global production and consumption. Dr. O'Rourke teaches courses on sustainable industry, environmental justice, and governance of global production at the University of California, Berkeley; was the co-founder and CEO of GoodGuide.com; and founded the Sustainability Science and Innovation team within Amazon.com. Dr. O'Rourke has consulted to the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme, the OECD, and a wide range of non-governmental organizations. He has worked with fenceline communities and workers up and down global supply chains from China, to Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, and El Salvador. His report on Nike's labor practices in Vietnam led to a front-page New York Times exposé that helped ignite a new era of corporate accountability. Dr. O'Rourke has published three books, and dozens of academic articles, including the award-winning Community-Driven Regulation (MIT Press, 2004) and Shopping for Good (MIT Press, 2012). Dr. O'Rourke was previously a professor at MIT.
Job Titles:
- Dean / Rausser College of Natural Resources
- Dean of the Rausser College
David Ackerly is the Dean of the Rausser College of Natural Resources and has a joint appointment in the departments of Integrative Biology and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California Berkeley. Current research in his lab examines drought tolerance of native tree species, potential impacts of climate change on plant communities, and post-fire forest dynamics following the 2017 northern California wildfires. His research is used to inform strategies of biodiversity conservation in the face of climate change, with a focus on California parks and open space. Ackerly received his B.A. in Biological Sciences from Yale University in 1984 and his Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Job Titles:
- Executive - in - Residence
David Riemer lives at the intersection of innovation and storytelling. He helps entrepreneurs, artists and business people focus their ideas through the power of narrative. In short, he helps people get their story straight.
After running an ad agency and holding numerous senior marketing roles in Internet companies, including Yahoo! earlier in his career, David created Box Out Industries to work with innovators and Spiral Staircase to collaborate with artists. He teaches at Berkeley-Haas Business school and speaks all over the world about the power of storytelling.
Job Titles:
- Executive Associate Dean / Rausser College of Natural Resources
- Professor of Biometeorology
Dennis Baldocchi is a Professor of Biometeorology in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and Executive Associate Dean in the Rausser College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on measuring and modeling water, carbon dioxide and methane exchange between ecosystems (natural and managed) and the atmosphere. He is co-founder of the international FLUXNET project, which measures gases fluxes at sites spanning the globe. He is a recipient of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Water Prize, for Surface Water, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society, and a Doctor Honoris Causa from Wageningen University.
Job Titles:
- Founder
- Media Executive With Time Warner
Dr. David Zilberman is a professor and holds the Robinson Chair in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley, where he has been since 1979. He was awarded the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 2019. In his time at UC Berkeley, he served as Department Chair of Agricultural and Resource Economics from 1994 to 1999, as Director of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics and the Center for Sustainable Resource Development, respectively; the Faculty Director of the Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program; and as a consultant to the World Bank, the USDA, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Environmental Protection Agency, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Job Titles:
- Nat Simons Presidential Chair in China Energy Policy / Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Dr. Jiang Lin is the Nat Simons Presidential Chair in China Energy Policy at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, a Staff Scientist at its China Energy Group, and an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Lin's research is focused on energy and climate policy, energy and emissions pathways, electricity market and planning, low-carbon economics transition and appliance efficiency issues in China. He is a co-Director of the Berkeley-Tsinghua Joint Research Center on Energy and Climate Change, a collaborative initiative between Berkeley Lab, the University of California-Berkeley, and Tsinghua University in China.
From 2007-2016, Dr. Lin was the Director of the Energy Foundation's China Sustainable Energy Program (2007-2013) and Senior Vice President for Strategy and Analysis (2014-2016). Dr. Lin managed the growth of Energy Foundation China into one of the largest international NGOs devoted to promoting clean energy and climate solutions in China. Before joining the Energy Foundation, Dr. Lin was previously at LBNL from 1994-2007, conducting research in the Appliance Standards and China Energy Groups.
Dr. Lin has a PhD in Demography from the University of California-Berkeley, an MS in Population Studies and BS from the Department of Cybernetics Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Dean of International and Executive Programs
Dr. Mio Katayama Owens is the Assistant Dean of International and Executive Programs in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology as an international student at UC Berkeley, specializing in Anthropology of Food and East Asian Prehistory. With ten years of managing anthropological fieldwork projects in Japan, Owens examined the long-term environmental impacts of food consumption behaviors and the role cultural factors play in societal definitions of food. After earning her Ph.D., Owens oversaw a variety of graduate student initiatives including business model development, revenue stream identification, public health, and impact assessment as an academic coordinator for an international nonprofit. She has taught Anthropology of Food and Archaeology courses at UC Berkeley and St. Mary's College in Moraga, California. At the College of Natural Resources, she leads the International and Executive Programs, collaborating with UC Berkeley faculty, staff, experts, and external stakeholders to effectively link academic and professional entities and develop professional programs in Berkeley and overseas. Together with the Academic Directors, Dean Emeritus and Professor J. Keith Gilless and Professor David Zilberman, Owens leads the internationally acclaimed Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Biotechnology & Genetic Engineering / Khulna University
Dr. S M Abdul-Awal earned his Ph.D. in plant sciences from the University of Cambridge, and is a professor of biotechnology and genetic engineering at Khulna University, Bangladesh. His work deals with poverty, food security, environmental sustainability, and climate resilient development. Projects of his have included providing safe drinking water to the rural people in the salinity-prone southwest coastal region of Bangladesh and increasing plasticity of agronomically important crops in this area by applying biotechnological principles and tools. Both projects work to reduce the poverty levels and disease conditions and to ensure food security in the area.
Dr. Abdul-Awal's long-term goal has been to create and maintain innovative works in the plant sciences, in order to form individual research groups in Bangladesh and to establish collaborations with renowned research organizations in the global scientific community. The Beahrs ELP was a great opportunity for him to work with environmental professionals from around the world, and establish lasting connections with them. He attended the program in 2017, and was able to return to UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher (Fulbright Fellow) at the Plant Gene Expression Center in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology.
In his role as visiting scholar, as well as Beahrs ELP alumnus, Dr. Abdul-Awal was invited to Munich, Germany to speak at the Global Food Summit. There, he was able to make the most of the speaking opportunity and accomplish his goal of creating an agribusiness grant in his own home country. He established the Global Food Summit Idea and Research Competition-2020, a business incubator that encourages research and innovation while offering the chance to attend and present at the Global Food Summit. Through this competition, Dr. Abdul-Awal has been able to encourage Bangladeshi students to help achieve Sustainable Development Goal-2030, as well as foster entrepreneurship and presentation skills among students, researchers, and academics. The experience, education, and connections he gained from the Beahrs ELP have allowed him to not only further his own goals, but continue to make lasting impact on the young entrepreneurs of Bangladesh.
Job Titles:
- Cooperative Extension Specialist / University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources
- Specialist in Climate and Water With the University of California Division of Agriculture
Dr. Theodore Grantham is a Cooperative Extension Specialist in climate and water with the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources and a faculty member of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) at U.C. Berkeley. Dr. Grantham's research integrates freshwater ecology, hydrology, and water resources engineering to inform sustainable, cost-effective practices and policies for managing water in California. Core research and extension interests include climate risk assessment, environmental flow science, and conservation planning. Dr. Grantham has over 15 years of professional experience in freshwater science and applied environmental research. Before arriving at Berkeley, he was a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and a postdoctoral researcher at the U.C. Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. Dr. Grantham earned his PhD from U.C. Berkeley (ESPM) and B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University.
Job Titles:
- Professor of International Sustainable Development
Maximilian Auffhammer is the George Pardee Jr. Professor of International Sustainable Development and Regional Associate Dean in the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley. Professor Auffhammer received his B.S. in environmental science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996, a M.S. in environmental and resource economics at the same institution in 1998, and a Ph.D. in economics from UC San Diego in 2003. He joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2003. His research focuses on environmental and resource economics, energy economics, and applied econometrics. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Energy and Environmental Economics group, a Humboldt Fellow, and served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His research has appeared in The American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Economic Journal, the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Energy Journal, and other academic journals. Professor Auffhammer is the recipient of the 2017 and 2021 Cheit Teaching Award in the Haas School of Business, the 2009 Campus Distinguished Teaching Award, the 2007 Cozzarelli Prize awarded by the National Academies of Sciences, and the 2007 Sarlo Distinguished Mentoring Award. He loves mountains in the winter, spending time with his family, and attempting to make the world a better place - cost-effectively.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Department of Agricultural
James (Jim) Sallee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Associate of the Energy Institute at Haas. He is a public economist who studies topics related to energy, the environment and taxation. His research focuses on policies aimed at reducing energy use and emissions in the transportation and power sectors. At Berkeley, he is leading the development of new professional education focused on climate change.
Job Titles:
- Deputy Director
- Deputy Director of the California Department of Water Resources
John Andrew is Deputy Director of the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), where he oversees all of DWR's climate change activities. Andrew was the lead author of DWR's white paper on climate change and water adaptation, Managing an Uncertain Future; Climate Change Adaptation Strategies for California's Water (October 2008), and was the water sector lead for the California Climate Change Adaptation Strategy/Safeguarding California Plan (December 2009/August 2014) and the State's Cap and Trade Investment Plan (May 2013). He also helped develop the water-related measures in the AB-32 Scoping Plan (December 2008), led the establishment of DWR's first sustainability policy (April 2009), and supervised the preparation of the DWR's Climate Action Plan (May 2012).
John has over 25 years of experience in water resources and environmental engineering, and holds degrees in Civil Engineering and Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Job Titles:
- Emeritus Board Member / Rausser College of Natural Resources Advisory Board
John Pardee ‘69 is a real estate and transactional attorney. He previously served as Counsel for The Trust for Public Land in San Francisco and as Senior County Counsel for San Diego County. He currently serves on the Land Protection Advisory Council for the Pacific Crest Trail Association and is a former member of the California Advisory Board for the Trust for Public Land. He is also a member of the Rausser College of Natural Resources Advisory Board. In 2008, John, his wife Vera, and other members of the Pardee family established the George M. Pardee, Jr. Family Chair in International Sustainable Development at the Rausser College of Natural Resources. John holds a B.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley and a J.D. from the University of Southern California.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy / University of California, Berkeley
- Assistant Professorof Energy
Jonas Meckling is Assistant Professorof Energy and Environmental Policyat the University of California, Berkeley.Hestudies the politics of climate and clean energy policy, with a focus on carbon pricing and green industrial policy. Jonas is the author of two books, the latest of which isCarbon Coalitions: Business, Climate Politics, and the Rise of Emissions Trading(MIT Press). He has published articles inInternational StudiesQuarterly,Governance,Science,Nature Energyand various other journals. Jonas is a Faculty Affiliate at the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley and a Fellow at the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy at Johns HopkinsUniversity. Previously, Jonas served as Senior Advisor to the German Minister for the Environment, was a Research Fellow at Harvard University, and worked at the European Commission. He holds a Ph.D.in International Political Economyfrom the London School of Economicsand Political Science.
Jonathan B. Jarvis was the inaugural Executive Director of UC Berkeley's Institute for Parks, People, and Diversity from 2017-2019. He served as the 18th Director of the United States National Park Service from 2009 until 2017. A career civil servant, Jarvis had been with the service for over 30 years, including tenures as the superintendent of Mount Rainier National Park, Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve.
Jarvis is a co-author of the book The Future of Conservation in America: A Chart for Rough Water (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Job Titles:
- President / Kass Green & Associates
Kass Green's experience spans over thirty years of managing and supervising GIS and remote sensing professionals, as well as leadership in GIS and remote sensing research and policy. Her research includes innovations in automated change detection and machine learning for object oriented image classification. Over the last seven years, Ms. Green has had the pleasure of using object oriented techniques to create fine-scale vegetation maps of Grand Canyon National Park, the national parks of Hawaii, and Sonoma County, California from high resolution optical and lidar imagery. Her work in this area continues with her current fine scale vegetation mapping projects in Marin and San Mateo Counties, California.
Ms. Green is the past chair of NASA's Earth Science Applications Committee, co-founded and chaired the Department of the Interior's Landsat Advisory Group and has served on a variety of Federal Advisory Committees for NASA, NOAA and DOI. She has taught numerous workshops for ASPRS and federal agencies, is a fellow and an honorary member in the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS), and a past president of both MAPPS and ASPRS. Her recent publications include the text Imagery and GIS, Best Practices for Extracting Information from Imagery (Green et al, 2018), and the third edition of Assessing the Accuracy of Remotely Sensed Data, Principles and Practices with Dr. Russell Congalton (Congalton and Green, 2019). Ms. Green's career was recently showcased in the Esri Press book, Women and GIS - Mapping Their Stories. Deemed a "rock star of remote sensing" by Directions Magazine, her research and accomplishments in mapping and GIS are world renowned.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Global Environmental Governance
- Professor of Global Environmental Governance and the Global / Local Politics of Wastes and Recycling
Kate O'Neill is a professor of Global Environmental Governance and the Global/Local Politics of Wastes and Recycling in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. As a nationally and internationally recognized expert in global environmental politics and governance, her research addresses how (and how well) the global community manages complex, unpredictable, and distributionally unjust problems, from the climate crisis to biodiversity loss, to wastes and chemical pollution. She is fascinated by the complexities of wastes as a global resource, and the implications of seismic global shifts on local recycling, waste work, and zero waste policies in the US and elsewhere. Kate is also Associate Dean for Instruction and Student Affairs at the Rausser College of Natural Resources. She has chaired her academic division, and served on campus and UC system wide task forces on student experiences and curriculum development. Kate holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She has written three books, Waste Trading Among Rich Nations: Building a New Theory of Environmental Regulation (MIT Press, 2000) The Environment and International Relations (Cambridge University Press 2009, 2nd edition 2017), and Waste (Polity Press 2019).
J. Keith Gilless is Dean Emeritus of the College of Natural Resources (CNR) at UC Berkeley, and holds a joint professorial appointment in CNR's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and its Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
Gilless's research program has encompassed issues in forest products trade and markets, regional economic analysis of resource-dependent communities, wildland fire protection planning, forestry decision support systems, and international development. He holds an appointment from California Governor Jerry Brown to the chair of the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, where he leads the development of general forest policy for the state and represents the state's interest in federal forestland. He is a recipient of Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award, and the co-author of two textbooks on forest resource management and economics. He has previously held visiting professor and researcher appointments at Beijing Forestry University and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Gilless earned his B.S. in Forestry from Michigan State University and a joint Ph.D. in Forestry and Agricultural Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Job Titles:
- Founder and Principal / Systems Leadership Lab
- Founder and Principal at the Systems Leadership Lab
Lisa Dreier is Founder and Principal at the Systems Leadership Lab, an independent consultancy that equips leaders to drive systemic change on complex issues. The Lab provides teaching, capacity building and thought leadership on the Systems Leadership approach - engaging a wide array of leaders and practitioners who work on sustainable development, social impact and corporate responsibility issues.
Prior to founding the Lab, Lisa developed research on Systems Leadership as a Senior Program Fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School's Corporate Responsibility Initiative, and designed executive education programs on social impact as Managing Director of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative. She researched food-system innovations as a Visiting Scholar with Stanford University's Center for Food Security and the Environment. She has authored or co-authored numerous reports and articles on sustainable development and leadership-related topics.
During 13 years at the World Economic Forum, Lisa pioneered the organization's practice of Systems Leadership, developing a unique approach profiled in a Harvard Kennedy School case study. She founded and led the Forum's largest and most action-oriented global program at the time, engaging over 650 organizations and 1500 individual leaders with a focus on transforming food systems. The initiative mobilized over 100 value-chain partnerships in 21 countries; catalyzed investments; partnered with the G7 and G20 on major initiatives; and founded a 150-person Transformation Leaders Network to support food system innovators.
Lisa previously worked at the U.N. Millennium Project and Columbia University Earth Institute, consulted with the World Bank and North American Development Bank, and worked for 8 years at the Environmental Defense Fund. She holds an M.P.P. in Public Policy and an M.A. in Energy and Resources from U.C. Berkeley, and a B.A. from Bowdoin College. She is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor and Russell L. Rustici Chair of Rangeland Ecology and Management
Lynn Huntsinger is a professor and the Russell L. Rustici Chair of Rangeland Ecology and Management at the University of California, Berkeley and Associate Dean of Instruction and Student Affairs for the College of Natural Resources. Her research focuses on the conservation and management of grasslands and woodlands, particularly the social and ecological systems that support working landscapes in the western United States. Her dissertation was on vegetation management using livestock, a topic that has surprisingly renewed resonance today given the massive fire problem in the western United States. She has published more than 160 articles and book chapters on topics including grazing ecology, ranching, and pastoralism. Example publications include "Save water or save wildlife? Water use and conservation in the central Sierran foothill oak woodlands of California, USA," published in Ecology and Society in 2017, Ecosystem services may be better termed social ecological services in a traditional pastoral system: The case of California Mediterranean rangelands at multiple scales in Ecology and Society in 2014; "Integrating social and ecological data to model metapopulations in coupled human and natural systems" published in Ecology in 2019;l and "Rebuilding pastoral social-ecological resilience on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in response to changes in policy, economics, and climate" in Ecology and Society in 2018. In 2018 she also co-edited a special issue in Rangeland Ecology and Management on Complex Rangeland Systems: Integrated Social-Ecological Approaches to Silvopastoralism.
Job Titles:
- Senior Policy Analyst
- Senior Policy Analyst for the Tennessee Department of Environment
Matthew Taylor is a senior policy analyst for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. His work involves many facets of sustainability and environmental policy, including managing teams responsible for the administration of sustainability programs, helping divisions learn how to overcome budgetary shortfall issues, and understanding how the state will implement new federal regulations. However, he has not had any formal training in environmental policy, so when he heard about the Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to come to UC Berkeley and engage with some of the world's foremost environmental experts.
In his time in the Beahrs ELP, Matthew found that what he learned from his fellow participants was just as valuable as what he learned from the instructors. He had the chance to engage and collaborate with environmental leaders from around the world, including two participants who represented their respective countries at the Paris Climate Agreement. He also got to work with people like Diego Tabilo, Executive Director of Fundación Tierral Austral (Tierra Austral Landtrust), who is making huge gains in land conservation in Chile. As many environmental issues are global and crosscut demographics, Matthew and his colleagues were facing similar problems, yet their variety of backgrounds and experiences led them to different solutions. With fellow participants who had rediscovered species thought extinct for over two decades, or who represented organizations working with Indigenous and traditional communities across the world, it was easy for him to tell that the people he was surrounded by were leaders in their respective fields. The opportunity to learn from and form connections with them was unique and invaluable to Matthew.
After completing the three-week program in 2019, Matthew was able to lead the successful passage of new legislation in Tennessee, which works to encourage food donation in order to address food waste. This legislation expands donor liability protections by allowing direct donation, aligning state protections with federal protections provided through the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act, as well as improving state legislation relating to feeding food waste to animals. Matthew believes that participation in the Beahrs ELP provided him with the confidence and experience necessary to meet with members of the state legislature and make the policy change sell to them.
Job Titles:
- Senior Manager Learning & Development / Rare Center for Behavior
Meg designs learning experiences at Rare's Center for Behavior and the Environment. Before joining the BE.Center, she managed learning and capacity development for Rare's Fish Forever program, which aims to empower government partners and coastal communities in the Philippines, Honduras, Brazil, Indonesia, Mozambique, and the Pacific Islands to manage their fisheries and adopt sustainable fishing behaviors. With her degree in Psychology and background in music and video production, she created training modules, tools, digital learning content, and songs to campaign for behavior change.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Michael Mascarenhas is a first-generation college graduate and a person of color, born in the United Kingdom of refugees from South Asia, an immigrant to Canada, and now the United States. Today, Michael Mascarenhas is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarship examines questions regarding access to water for communities of color in an era of deeply racialized neoliberalism. His disciplinary fields include environmental justice and racism, postcolonial theory, and science and technology studies. His first book, Where the Waters Divide (Lexington Books, 2012), examines the market-based policies that produce inequitable water resource access for First Nations' people in Canada. His second book, New Humanitarianism and the Crisis of Charity: Good Intentions on the Road to Help (Indiana University Press, 2017), applies a similar methodological approach to investigate the privatization of humanitarian aid following disasters. He is also the editor of Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More (Sage Publishing 2020).
Mascarenhas holds a BSc in geology from Brock University, a post-baccalaureate in environmental science from Capilano University, a MSc degree in forestry from the University of British Columbia (UBC), and a PhD in Sociology from Michigan State University. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Applied Ethics at UBC and has held teaching appointments at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His current research and book project, Thirsty for Environmental Justice, examines the water crises in the cities of Flint and Detroit. Mascarenhas was an expert witness at the Michigan Civil Rights Commission on the Flint Water Crisis, and an invited speaker to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Committee on Designing Citizen Science to Support Science Learning. He lives in Berkeley, California with his partner, twin sons, and rescued dog.
Job Titles:
- Advisor to the Dean and Executive - in - Residence / Rausser College of Natural Resources
Mike Cheng is the Advisor to the Dean and Executive-In-Residence in the Rausser College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley. He transitioned to this current role after his nine-year term as a RCNR Advisory Board member with the aim of exploring opportunities to enhance collaborations between Rausser College of Natural Resources (RCNR) and the industry. Mike is also a faculty member in the Master of Molecular Science and Software Engineering (MSSE) Program from the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and an advisory board member of the Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program.
Mike had a 30-year career as an executive in the technology industry before pursuing his current interest in academia. He has served as the MBA Director at Golden Gate University where he led the redesign and launch of their current MBA and EMBA programs. He is an adjunct professor of management in the Ageno School of Business and has served on the School's Advisory Board.
During his time in the technology industry, Mike served as the Corporate Vice President and President of the Eimac Division of Communications & Power Industry Inc. (CPI), a successor company of Varian Associates in Palo Alto, CA. Prior to that he held management positions in Marketing and Operations at both CPI and Varian Associates.
Mike is a graduate of the Management of Technology Companies program from the American Electronics Association/Stanford Executive Institute. He holds an MBA in General Management from Golden Gate University and received a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
Mike and his wife, Ruth, also an alumna of UC Berkeley, are active supporters of numerous academic units on the Berkeley campus. Together, they have two grown daughters and four grandchildren.
Job Titles:
- Co - Lead for Research and Training
Paige Passano is co-Lead for Research and Training for OASIS, a non-profit organization working to expand education and choice for women and girls in the Sahel. She holds an MPH in International Public Health from the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Since 2007, she has been affiliated with the Bixby Center for Population, Health & Sustainability at UC Berkeley, working to expand women's and girls' autonomy, reduce maternal mortality, and increase access to reproductive health services. From 2016 to 2019 she directed OASIS' Sahel Leadership Program (SLP) which trains and networks West African development professionals from five francophone Sahel countries. She is a founding member of the Elles du Sahel, an regional advocacy network with members in Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Mauritania that is working to amplify the voices of female leaders in critical decisions that affect current and future generations.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director, Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity
Patrick Gonzalez, Ph.D., is a climate change scientist and forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He advances science-based action on human-caused climate change to protect nature and people, through research on climate change, ecosystems, wildfire, and carbon solutions and assistance to local people and policymakers. Dr. Gonzalez has conducted field research in Africa, Latin America, and the U.S., published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and other journals, and assisted field managers and local people in 25 countries and 269 U.S. national parks. He has stood publicly for scientific integrity and broadened public understanding of climate change in the New York Times and other media. He served as Principal Climate Change Scientist of the U.S. National Park Service and Assistant Director for Climate and Biodiversity of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Dr. Gonzalez has served as a lead author for four reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the science panel awarded a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Job Titles:
- Cooperative Extension Specialist
Cooperative Extension Specialist Peggy Lemaux's laboratory performs both basic and applied research focused primarily on cereal crops, like sorghum, wheat, rice and barley. The objectives of these studies are to better understand crop plants and to use that knowledge to improve their performance and quality. More recently efforts with colleagues have focused on bioenergy - especially in the versatile feedstock, sorghum. In addition to research, Lemaux develops educational resources on food and agriculture that are disseminated to professionals, the media and consumers. These resources include an award-winning website (http://ucbiotech.org) that has afterschool curricula for middle school students, educational displays and games, videos, PowerPoint presentations and fact sheets. In 2015 the Global Food Initiative, through the UC Office of the President, provided resources for the CLEAR (Communication, Literacy and Education for Agricultural Research) program. This effort focuses on mentoring undergrads, grads and postdocs to engage in science-based communication with the media, legislators and the general public.
In his role as senior coordinator of human wildlife conflict management and capacity building, Harshad Karandikar led WWF-India's work on human wildlife conflict issues across ten geographic areas. He worked with field teams to design and implement strategies for preventing and managing conflict, increase the reach of their interventions, and move from charity-based to sustainable models. He coordinated several projects at WWF-India, including "Create to Inspire," which worked to generate urban biodiversity awareness in New Delhi through artistic mediums.
While Harshad had a great deal of experience working on wildlife management and conservation, he had no formal training in the environmental sciences or conservation. He also had goals of making WWF-India's human wildlife conflict initiatives more sustainable, replicable, and community-managed, and working on conservation issues at a global level. The Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program seemed to him the perfect opportunity to learn technical skills while also appreciating wider, more holistic perspectives. He attended the program in 2016 and was amazed by how much he gained in just three weeks. The Beahrs ELP provided him with technical knowledge, skills, and frameworks that he could apply directly to his work, as well as entirely new understandings of the issues he'd been dealing with for years.
The Beahrs ELP broadened Harshad's horizons by providing him exposure to the unique research environment of UC Berkeley's Rausser College of Natural Resources, and giving him the opportunity to learn from both expert instructors and his fellow participants. He was able to meet, engage with, and learn from environmental leaders from around the world, and maintain connections with them in the years since. Harshad received the Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study and is now a PhD candidate in Rausser College's Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management. He will always be grateful to the Beahrs ELP, both for how it changed his life, and for its continued impact on participants and their communities year after year.
Job Titles:
- Mediator / Susan Carpenter and Associates
- Mediator, Trainer, and Writer
Susan Carpenter is a mediator, trainer, and writer in private practice. She has spent the past thirty-five years developing and managing programs to reach consensus and resolve controversies at the local, state, and national level. She was the founding director of the Program for Community Problem Solving in Washington, D.C. Prior to that she spent ten years as the associate director of ACCORD Associates in Boulder, Colorado mediating complex public disputes and training others to handle conflict productively.
Ms. Carpenter holds a Doctorate in Future Studies from the University of Massachusetts. She was the first Visiting Fellow at the Program on Negotiation at the Harvard Law School. She taught for two years in Ethiopia as a Peace Corps volunteer. Ms. Carpenter has authored numerous materials including the book, Managing Public Disputes: A Practical Guide to Handling Conflict and Reaching Agreements. She currently works with diverse stakeholder groups to reach agreements on complex public issues and to build capacity for collaborative leadership. She resides in Southern California.
Will Parish is a credentialed public high school science educator with a 30-year record of innovative accomplishments in the environmental and educational fields. He taught environmental science and civics at Gateway High School in San Francisco, and now serves on their board. He served on the California State Board of Education's Curriculum Commission and then founded Ten Strands as a nonprofit organization to support California's efforts to achieve statewide penetration of high-quality environment-based education into schools.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Professor
- Department of Environmental Toxicology, UC Davis
Zachary Wong, Ph.D., D.A.B.T. is an accomplished professor, environmental scientist, author, consultant, and senior manager in business and project management for over thirty years. He is an Honored Instructor at the University of California at Berkeley Extension and Adjunct Professor at the University of California at Davis. He has held senior management positions in research and technology, strategic planning, business analysis, and health, environment, and safety -- which included over 200 major projects. He is an active management consultant for Fortune 100 companies in leadership, organizational and personal effectiveness, and teamwork and an author of three popular books in Project Management.
"I bring a lot of practical, hands-on knowledge and experience to the classroom," he says. "Thirty years in private industry and international business have helped me to bring key concepts to life for the students. Also, my diverse work background has allowed me to put things in a larger perspective and to identify the most critical elements for leadership and success."