UC REGENTS - Key Persons
Carl Boettiger(link is external) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management(link is external) at UC Berkeley. Carl works on problems in ecological forecasting and decision making under uncertainty, with applications for global change, conservation and natural resource management. Carl is particularly interested in how we can predict or manage ecological systems that may experience regime shifts: sudden and dramatic changes that challenge both our models and available data. The rapid expansion in both computational power and the available ecological and environmental data enables and requires new mathematical, statistical and computational approaches to these questions. Ecology has much to learn about what are and are not useful from advances in informatics & computer science, just as it has from statistics and mathematics. Traditional approaches to ecological modeling and resource management such as stochastic dynamic systems, Bayesian inference, and optimal control theory must be adapted both to take advantage of all available data while also dealing with its imperfections. Carl's approach blends ecological theory with the synthesis of heterogeneous data and the development of software-- a combination now recognized as data science. Carl is a co-founder of the rOpenSci project(link is external), a senior fellow at BIDS(link is external), and a science adviser to NCEAS(link is external), reflecting his interests in open science, data science, and ecoinformatics.
Job Titles:
- Faculty Director & Associate Professor
Job Titles:
- Faculty Director & Associate Professor
Joseph is a Professor in the EECS department(link is external) at UC Berkeley, a co-director and founding member of the UC Berkeley RISE Lab(link is external) and a member of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR(link is external) Group).
Job Titles:
- G.R. & W.M. Goertz Professor
- Professor
Justin Brashares is the G.R. & W.M. Goertz Professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Justin's research combines approaches from ecology with interdisciplinary environmental science to better understand how human activities are impacting biodiversity, and to highlight and communicate the everyday consequences of these changes for society. Work in Justin's group extends traditional environmental science to consider the economic, political and cultural factors that drive and, in turn, are driven by global change. Through these efforts, Justin and his group at Berkeley strive to propose empirically-based, action-oriented strategies for the conservation of ecosystems and the services they provide us.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director
- Executive Director for the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Kevin Koy is Executive Director for the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at Berkeley (DSE) where he works to enable the Center's mission to develop impactful computational solutions to the challenges facing our environment. He brings more than two decades of experience working in environmental science, data science, and human-centered design with the goal of providing people with the best environments and approaches to take on complex challenges.
Kevin comes to the Schmidt Center for DSE from the global design and innovation firm, IDEO(link is external), where he served as Senior Director working to develop a data-enabled design practice. Previously, he was the founding Executive Director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)(link is external), Managing Director of Stanford University's Data Science and AI Affiliates Programs, Executive Director of UC Berkeley's Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF)(link is external), and Geospatial/Remote Sensing Specialist for the American Museum of Natural History's Center for Biodiversity & Conservation(link is external) and the Smithsonian Institution's Conservation Biology Institute(link is external)
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor and Cooperative Extension Specialist
Maggi Kelly is Professor and Cooperative Extension Specialist at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and an expert in spatial data science. She has dedicated her career to redefining the boundaries of mapping-technology and its application to understanding dynamic landscapes. She has applied her technological expertise to crucial problems across the state, such as understanding and documenting wildfires, tracking and predicting forest diseases, improving agriculture and water usage, and climate change. She is faculty director of the Geospatial Innovation Facility and Director of the ANR Statewide Program in Informatics and Geographic Information Systems (IGIS).
Job Titles:
- Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Poli
Paolo D'Odorico is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management(link is external) at UC Berkeley(link is external). His research focuses on the role of hydrological processes in the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Through the analysis of the soil water balance he has highlighted important nonlinearities in the coupling between soil moisture dynamics and plant water stress, biogeochemical cycling, land-atmosphere interactions, plant community composition, and soil susceptibility to wind erosion. Using field observations and process-based models, Paolo is investigating new mechanisms of desertification and factors contributing to the resilience of the desert margins. His group's work has highlighted the role played by positive feedbacks with the physical environment on the resilience of savannas, dry tropical forests, desert shurblands, freshwater wetlands, mangrove swamps, and seagrass meadows. His work has also shown how environmental noise may increase the complexity of ecosystem dynamics by inducing new states, bifurcations, or pattern formation. Paolo is currently investigating the globalization of water through virtual water trade and international land investments, and its impact on water equity, societal resilience, environmental stewardship, and food security.
Job Titles:
- Associate Dean for the Faculty and Research & Professor / Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley
- Professor and Chair
Sandrine Dudoit(link is external) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Statistics and Professor in the Division of Biostatistics, School of Public, at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Dudoit's methodological research interests regard high-dimensional inference and include exploratory data analysis (EDA), visualization, loss-based estimation with cross-validation (e.g., density estimation, classification, regression, model selection), and multiple hypothesis testing. Much of her methodological work is motivated by statistical inference questions arising in biological research and, in particular, the design and analysis of high-throughput microarray and sequencing gene expression experiments, e.g., single-cell transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) for discovering novel cell types and for the study of stem cell differentiation. Her contributions include: exploratory data analysis, normalization and expression quantitation, differential expression analysis, class discovery, prediction, inference of cell lineages, integration of biological annotation metadata (e.g., Gene Ontology (GO) annotation). She is also interested in statistical computing and, in particular, reproducible research. She is a founding core developer of the Bioconductor Project (http://www.bioconductor.org(link is external)), an open-source and open-development software project for the analysis of biomedical and genomic data.
Professor Dudoit is a co-author of the book Multiple Testing Procedures with Applications to Genomics and a co-editor of the book Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Solutions Using R and Bioconductor. She is Associate Editor of three journals, including The Annals of Applied Statistics and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Professor Dudoit was named Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2010, Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute in 2014, and Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2021.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Manager
- Administrative Manager for the Schmidt Center for DSE
Stacey Dorton is the Administrative Manager for the Schmidt Center for DSE, serving as our Office Jedi. She is an administrative professional with 25 years' experience in office management. She has done administrative work for a wide variety of organizations, including an elementary school, psychiatric facility, waste management firm, and a catering company. She also has extensive experience in the event management and social media fields. She is a native of the Oakland/Berkeley area and a graduate of UC Berkeley (class of '95) majoring in women's studies. GO BEARS!