Alex Purves

I teach and study early Greek poetry, with a special interest in the elements, especially air and water. In addition to Micro-Sappho, which considers the ontological status of tiny, minute or immaterial words and things in Sappho’s poetry, I am also writing a book entitled Blue Homer: Reading the Sea in and beyond the Odyssey. The first three chapters of this work examine the sea in early Greek poetry from the position of depth, surface, and shore, while its second half considers the color of the sea in Joyce’s Ulysses and immersion underwater in Walcott’s Omeros as a means of reframing Homeric reception.

I am also co-organizing a conference with Professor Louise Hornby (English) entitled Elemental Readings I: Air, on the weather, breath, air, and the environment (May 19-20, 2023, UCLA Luskin Conference Center).

David Blake

David serves as an administrator for the UCLA La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science and UCLA Stunt Ranch Santa Monica Mountains Reserve, collaborating with Director Brad Shaffer to oversee and maintain both the facilities and the programs they fund. In this capacity, David provides support to both the La Kretz Center and Stunt Ranch by facilitating communication with users and partners, organizing events and grant opportunities, and creating student engagement programs. As a UCLA undergraduate, David contributed to various wildlife research projects, including conducting extensive bumblebee diversity and habitat surveys in the Siskiyou Mountains and developing a habitat suitability model for the federally endangered Arroyo Toad. In his current role, David uses his field work and data analysis skills to assist researchers in achieving their goals and help students gain experience in their chosen field of interest.

Andrea Pilar Drager

Andrea’s research has been focused on community ecology and biodiversity, plant reproduction, and plant-pollinator interactions in tropical forests. Drager has experience managing lab and field research teams and projects, engaging stakeholders, and working in diverse and international contexts on topics related to ecosystem services, community conservation and sustainable agriculture. Currently, she is a Fulbright Scholar working with the University of Dschang, Cameroon, and forest communities, to document local ecological knowledge and ethnotaxonomy related to pollinators, particularly bees, in the Congo Basin rainforest. Learning to take a more holistic, interdisciplinary, inclusive, and applied approach to research is important to Andrea, as she is working to lower barriers to scientific communication between lower- and higher-resource countries.

Patrycja Sasnal

Dr. Patrycja Sasnal is a political scientist, Arabist and philosopher. She is visiting professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA in Los Angeles and professor of migration at College of Europe. She also works as head of research at the Polish Institute of International Affairs. She is an expert of the Advisory Committee of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, member of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ council, and the Polish Ombudsman office’s expert commission on migration. She was previously a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington and an associate researcher at the American University in Beirut. She specializes in Middle Eastern politics, migration and political violence. She has written for The Guardian, Le Monde and Polityka. Her latest book is Arendt, Fanon and Political Violence in Islam (Routledge, 2019). Sasnal holds a PhD in political science.

At IoES UCLA, she works on a report for the UN Human Rights Council regarding the impact of technologies for climate protection on the enjoyment on human rights. In the Spring quarter 22/23 she will teach a class on Geoengineering and Human Rights.

Lucia Bolzoni

Hannah Myint

Hannah is a IoES Ph.D. student, most recently graduating from the University of San Francisco where Hannah focused on physics and environmental studies. Hannah is intrigued by the mechanisms that drive and generate wildfires in the Western US region. Using satellite and climate model data, Hannah is interested in quantifying the effect of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire smoke hazards and assessing the resulting impact of air pollution on urban populations. 

Racquel Fox

Julia Wu

Alesia Montgomery

Alesia Montgomery is an Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability (IoES). An ethnographer, Montgomery studies the social and environmental justice concerns of low-income, racialized communities. Her book, Greening the Black Urban Regime: The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit, focuses on battles over the aims and strategies of green redevelopment. Her publications also include articles in the International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, City & Community, Ethnography, Antipode, Sociological Perspectives, and Global Networks.

Currently, Montgomery is studying (1) the politics and consequences of water insecurity in low-income, racialized communities and (2) constructions of political, cultural, and research bridges across communities to evaluate, re-imagine, and rebuild connections with water. Montgomery’s areas of research and teaching expertise span urban studies, environmental sociology, sociology of technology, race/class/gender/sexuality, social theory, and qualitative methods. She is involved in collaborations across institutions to develop new methods and tools for gathering, analyzing, preserving, and sharing qualitative data about environmental problems, in ways that further the rigor of research and its accessibility to communities. As part of this work, she serves on the Research Advisory Board for the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) at Syracuse University. 

Montgomery holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Political Science from UC Irvine. She was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley, and a Rockefeller Graduate Summer Internship in Womanist Studies at the University of Georgia.

Gabriela Carr

Gabriela (Gabi) Carr (she/her) is a second year PhD student. Her research focuses on urban marine ecosystems in Los Angeles, and particularly on the use of coastal infrastructure as habitat. Born and raised in New York City, she has since lived in Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles, each city encouraging her fascination with urban habitats in new ways. She currently uses environmental DNA as her primary survey method, and will incorporate circulation modeling and remote sensing with drones as well. Her master’s work at University of Washington focused on the impact of septic systems on Washington shellfish harvest sites under sea level rise conditions. Prior to the master’s, she worked in environmental education in Los Angeles. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, her research ranged from prairie restoration to ocean acidification impacts.