Untitled — Page 101 — Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA

Robert Watson

Professor Watson’s book Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance, won the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment’s prize for the best book of ecocriticism of 2005-07 as well as the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Prize,“awarded annually for the best book published in early modern studies.” Among his more recent environmental publications are “Protestant Animals: Puritan Sects and Animal-Protection Sentiment, 1550-1650” in ELH (2014), “Shadows of the Renaissance” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014), “Tell Inconvenient Truths, But Tell Them Slant” in Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts, (2014), and “Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Ecology of Human Being” in Ecocritical Shakespeare (2011).

His 2019 book Cultural Evolution and its Discontents: Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure explores the way Darwinian competition among socio-cultural systems can make them destructive of human virtues as they exploit us for their own survival, with the battle between capitalism and environmentalism as a crucial instance.

Most of his scholarship, however, is on William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Renaissance culture. He has also published poems in the New Yorker and dozens of other literary journals.

In 2001, he received the annual UCLA Distinguished Teaching Prize, and from 2006-8 he held the Gold Shield prize, given to one faculty member at the university for outstanding contributions in research, teaching, and public service.

Education

B.A., summa cum laude, Yale University, 1971-75
Ph.D., Highest Honors, Stanford University, 1975-79

Robert Wayne

Research Interests

Application of molecular genetic techniques to questions in systematics, population genetics, and sociobiology.

Daniel Weiss

Daniel Weiss is co-founder and Managing Partner of Angeleno Group LLC (“AG”), a Los Angeles-based private equity firm with a global platform focused on high growth investments in next generation energy and natural resource-related companies. Founded in 2001, AG invests broadly across the energy and natural resource industry to support innovative, well managed, rapidly growing businesses. Areas of particular interest include advanced generation, energy intelligence and control, clean transportation, renewables, transmission and distribution, power storage, and energy efficiency and conservation technology. Since its founding, AG has become one of the largest dedicated growth equity investment firms in the sector. AG makes investments internationally with investment professionals based in Los Angeles and Sydney, covering North America and the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to his firm management responsibilities, Mr. Weiss leads investments and serves on boards of multiple AG portfolio companies.

Prior to the formation of AG, Mr. Weiss was an attorney at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles, working in the firm’s mergers and acquisitions, international and high technology practice groups. He represented multiple Global 1000 clients, including utilities and energy related companies, in a wide array of private equity and corporate finance transactions.

Mr. Weiss currently or previously has served on boards or public commissions for a number of non-profit and government organizations including the World Resources Institute, the Stanford Law School Board of Visitors, and the City of Los Angeles Redistricting Commission. Mr. Weiss was appointed by President Obama in 2015 to serve as a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in Washington, DC. He is currently member of the Pacific Council on International Policy and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Weiss holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, an M.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. with High Honors from U.C. Berkeley.

Robert Weiss

He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota, School of Statistics in 1989. After a postdoc in the UCLA School of Medicine, Department of Biomathematics, he joined the UCLA School of Public Health in the Department of Biostatistics. He became a full professor in 2002 and was honored as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) in 2003. He was chair-elect of the Section on Bayesian Statistical Sciences of the ASA in 2011 and is chair in 2012 and will be past-chair in 2013.

Arthur Winer

Professor Winer’s research program focuses primarily on experimental and modeling studies concerned with air pollutant exposure assessment, with an emphasis on children’s exposure to toxic air contaminants, including diesel exhaust. Recent and current field studies involve measurements in several microenvironments important for children’s exposure, including residential homes, portable classrooms and diesel school buses. The overarching goal of all these field-based research projects is to more accurately characterize air pollutant exposure in critical microenvironments, rather than relying on data from and handful of fixed-site outdoor air monitors.

Samuel Wanji

Paula White

Paula White is a wildlife biologist specializing in field studies of wild carnivores. Since 1985, she has worked on a variety of carnivore species, from killer whales to African genets, investigating distribution, habitat use, social organization, predation, disease, genetics, and more. Her primary research interests include behavioral ecology and the evolution of sociality in carnivores in relation to food resources.

With a background in both wildlife management and the biological sciences, Paula is keenly aware of the need for improved information-sharing between managers and academics, and has sought to build bridges to help ensure that agencies and other policy-makers have access to robust science upon which to base informed decisions that can directly impact conservation.

White conducts research primarily in North America and Africa. From 2004-2014, she developed and ran the Zambia Lion Project (ZLP); the first study to genetically characterize Zambia’s lions. Working with national wildlife agencies including Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) and the USFWS, as well as international regulatory committees e.g., Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), ZLP also was instrumental in developing age criteria for wild lions as part of broader regional and global efforts promoting sustainable trade.

Paula is currently a Senior Research Fellow at UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She is a long-time member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Canid Specialist Group and the African Lion Working Group. Her current research is focused on pioneering techniques to estimate age in wild carnivores, and the effects of climate change on insular Arctic fox populations in Alaska.

1985. B.A. Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Honors.

1992. M.S. Wildland Resource Science, University of California, Berkeley.

2002. PhD. Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley.

Recent publications listed below. Additional publications may be found on ResearchGate.

White, P.A., Bertola, L.D., Kariuki, K., and H.H. de Iongh. 2024. Human procurement of meat from lion (Panthera leo) kills: Costs of disturbance and implications for carnivore conservation. PLOS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0308068

Bowyer, R.T., Bleich, V.C., White, P.A., and J.L. Rachlow. 2024. Advances in the conservation of large terrestrial mammals. Frontiers. doi:10.3389/fevo.2024.1421638

Clements, H., et al. (many authors including P.A. White). 2024. The bii4africa dataset of faunal and floral population intactness estimates across Africa’s major land uses. Nature Scientific Data 11:191 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02832-6.

Norén, K., White, P.A., and A. Angerbjörn. 2023. Arctic fox Vulpes lagopus (Linnaeus, 1758). Pages 1-26 in K. Hackländer and F.E. Zachos, eds. Handbook of the Mammals of Europe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65038-8_116-1.

Hiller, T., Nistler, C., Reding, D., White, P.A., and F. Bled. 2022. Sex identification and age estimation of bobcats and implications for management. Wildlife Society Bulletin doi: 10.1002/wsb.1328.

White, P.A., and B. Van Valkenburgh. 2022. Low-cost forensics reveal high rates of non-lethal snaring and shotgun injuries in Zambia’s large carnivores. Frontiers in Conservation Science doi: 10.3389/fcosc.2022.803381.

Van Valkenburgh, B., and P.A. White. 2021. Naturally-occurring tooth wear, tooth fracture, and cranial injuries in large carnivores from Zambia. PeerJ 9:e11313 doi:10.7717/peerj.11313.

Mitchell, C.D., Bleich, V.C., Bowyer, R.T., Heffelfinger, J.R., Stewart, K.M., and P.A. White. 2021. A call for more nuanced dialogues about trophy hunting. Journal of Wildlife Management 85(3):418-422. https://doi: 10.1002/jwmg.22017.

Curry, C.J., White, P.A., and J.N. Derr. 2019. Genetic analysis of African lions (Panthera leo) in Zambia support movement across anthropogenic and geographical barriers. PLOS ONE 14(5): e0217179, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217179.

White, P.A., and A.J. Kim. 2018. A summary report and photographic catalogue of African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) in the southern Kafue ecosystem, Zambia 2007-2012. Canid Biology & Conservation 21(2):4-11, http://www.canids.org/CBC/21/wild_dogs_in_Zambia.pdf. doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.5619187.

Bolton, J.L., White, P.A., Burrows, D.G., Lundin, J.I., and G.M. Ylitalo. 2017. Food resources influence levels of persistent organic pollutants and stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in tissues of Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) from the Pribilof Islands, Alaska. Polar Research Special Issue: Arctic Fox 36(2): http://doi.org/10.1080/17518369.2017.1310994.

Spraker, T.R., and P.A. White. 2016. Shaggy lame fox syndrome in Pribilof Island Arctic foxes (Alopex lagopus pribilofensis), Alaska. Veterinary Pathology Published on-line before print 19 August 2016; doi:10.1177/0300985816660745. [2017 54(2):258-268].

Bertola, L.D., Jongbloed, H., van der Gaag, K., de Knijff, P., Yamaguchi,N., Hooghiemstra, H., Bauer, H., Henschel, P., White, P.A., Driscoll, C.A., Tende,T., Ottosson,U., Saidu,Y., Vrieling K., and H.H. de Iongh. 2016. Phylogeographic patterns in Africa and high resolution delineation of genetic clades in the lion (Panthera leo). Scientific Reports 6, 30807; doi:10.1038/srep30807.

White, P.A., and J.L. Belant. 2016. Individual variation in dental characteristics for estimating age of African lions. Wildlife Biology 22(3):71-77, doi:10.2981/wlb.00180.

White, P.A., Ikanda, D., Ferrante, L., Chardonnet, P., Mesochina, P., and R. Cameriere. 2016. Age estimation of African lions Panthera leo by ratio of tooth areas. PLOS ONE 11(4): e0153648, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.015648. Figshare doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3159430.

Curry, C.J., White, P.A., and J.N. Derr. 2015. Mitochondrial haplotype diversity in Zambian lions: bridging a gap in the biogeography of an iconic species. PLOS ONE 10(12): e0143827, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0143827.