Neil Lessem is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of economics at UCLA. His current research examines consumer demand for environmentally friendly or “green” products. This involves applying and extending the social science literature on pro-social choices (as opposed to pro-self) into the green product/activity realm. Neil believes economics provides a great tool set for looking at the world. To him, the core insight of economics is that people follow incentives – so to understand why people or firms are engaging in actions that lead to a poor outcome for themselves or society, we just need to understand where their incentives lie. Apart from economics, Neil enjoys mountain biking, volleyball, hiking, cycling and soccer. Originally from South Africa, Neil obtained an honours degree in business and economics at the University of Cape Town.
Dennis Lettenmaier
Dennis Lettenmaier is a Distinguished Professor of Geography. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (summa cum laude) at the University of Washington in 1971, his MS in Civil, Mechanical, and Environmental Engineering at the George Washington University in 1973, and his PhD at the University of Washington in 1975. His research interests include hydrological modeling and prediction, hydrologic remote sensing, hydrology-climate interactions, and water management. He served as a University of Washington faculty member from 1976 to 2014, when he joined UCLA’s faculty. In addition to his faculty service, he spent a year as visiting scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, VA (1985-86) and was the program manager of NASA’s Land Surface Hydrology Program at NASA Headquarters in 1997-98. He is an author or co-author of over 350 journal articles. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the European Geosciences Union (EGU), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the American Association of Geographers (AAG). He is a Fellow of AGU, AMS, and AAAS. He was the first Chief Editor of the AMS Journal of Hydrometeorology, and is a past President of AGU’s Hydrology Section. He was a recipient of ASCE’s Huber Research Prize in 1990, AGU’s Hydrology Section Award in 2000, the AMS Charney Medal in 2017, and AGU’s Horton Medal in 2018, He is a member of the International Water Academy and the National Academy of Engineering.
Education
PhD, Civil Engineering, University of Washington, 1975
MS, Civil, Mechanical and Environmental Engineering, The George Washington University, 1972
BSc, Summa cum laude, Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, 1970
Qinbin Li
B.S., M.S., Peking (Beijing) University, China
PhD, Atmospheric Chemistry, Harvard University
Specialty: Atmospheric Chemistry
Jinghui Lim
Rong Liu
Research Interests
My researches address the development of a practical approach and a computational platform for environmental risk assessment of Engineered Nanomaterials (ENMs), which increasing use in modern industrial products and processes has raised public concern regarding their potential release and damage to the environment. Development of such a platform requires the researches for High Throughput Screening (HTS) data processing methods (e.g., outlier removal, normalization, hit-identification), data mining for ENMs bioactivity data (e.g., clustering analysis for similar ENMs and exploring relationships among ENMs bioactivities), and decision support approach for ENMs environmental risk assessment.
I am also participating in nanoinformatics initiatives and developing tools/resources for integration and management of heterogeneous information, defining ENMs ontology, and modeling based knowledge extraction. In particular, I am interested in the development of (Quantitative)-Structure-Activity Relationships ((Q)SARs)) that can predict ENMs bioactivity from their structural and physicochemical properties and assist in the understanding of the mechanisms governing the behavior of ENMs in biological/ecological systems.
In addition to ENMs environmental risk assessment, my research interests also include general machine learning/data mining topics, such as development of supervised and unsupervised feature selection methods (to identify suitable features/descriptors for machine learning/data mining model development) and pattern recognition method for biological images.
Jamie Lloyd-Smith
I study the ecology of infectious diseases in wildlife and human populations. In California, my group is studying the dynamics of leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that has caused recurring, deadly outbreaks in California sea lions since 1970. We are collaborating with marine mammal stranding and rehabilitation centers, as well as government biologists, to understand the drivers of this disease and its impact on sea lions and other marine species. We are also collaborating with the National Park Service to understand the conservation implications of an on-going leptospirosis outbreak in the endangered Channel Island fox.
Elizabeth Long
As a La Kretz Center/Natural History Museum postdoc, Elizabeth conducted intensive field surveys to determine butterfly species richness, abundance, and declines in Southern California, with special emphasis on the Santa Monica Mountains and urban Los Angeles.
Elizabeth was the former Director of Conservation Science at the 8500 acre Mohonk Reserve in upper state New York. As Director, she oversaw a research program that is diverse in taxonomic scope and boasts biological inventories and phenological records dating back to the 1920s.