Eli’s primary interest is the hydrological cycle.  He utilizes observations and dynamically downscaled GCM simulations to evaluate the transfers of water and energy between the land surface and the atmosphere. Land–atmosphere interactions can either intensify drought, or enhance precipitation, depending on the local climate, timescale, and region. As the climate continues to evolve, these interactions will also change, leading to important differences in drought, extreme precipitation, and water resources.

Eli received his PhD from the University of Maryland in August 2021 and joined the Center for Climate Science in September 2021. His dissertation focused on the role of land surface properties in modulating land–atmosphere interactions to affect surface fluxes of water and energy, low-level atmospheric thermodynamics, atmospheric stability, dynamical moisture transports, and regional precipitation.  Before his PhD research began, he spent time NASA-GSFC studying local land-atmosphere interactions and the initialization of soil moisture in NWP models. He completed his BS and MS at Penn State with focuses on hail production in idealized supercell thunderstorms and convection initiation in operational NWP models, respectively.

Water is a fundamental human necessity. It is Eli’s hope that his research will lead to a better understanding of the water cycle and eventually to more sustainable water use practices and policy.

Lei is a climate data scientist in Alex’s research group. His job duties have two main aspects, data management and assisting in workflows. He manages large gridded geospatial datasets that the group uses, including local instances of large public datasets, and the output of simulations conducted in the group which is being archived on cloud platform such as AWS. He also performs a quarterly inventory check of the group’s data holdings to ensure that local storage, data archives, and backups are being properly used. He helps group scientists/students build and optimize workflows at the code level. This includes reviewing processing/analysis scripts’ functionality and correctness, as well as coordinating with group members to properly manage, organize, and advertise optimized codes on GitHub and other storage systems.

Lei joined our group in July 2021.  He obtained his BS and MS degree at Peking University in China and PhD degree at The University of Texas at Austin. Before joining UCLA, he was a research technologist at JPL, where he has developed and debugged data production software for the Jason-3, Sentinel-6, and SWOT microwave radiometers.

RESEARCH AND INTERESTS

Herrera’s research investigates the social, economic, and political dimensions of natural resource management in developing countries, with a focus on Latin American cities. She studies how urban communities compensate for weak states and institutions in their consumption of environmental goods and services, such as drinking water and flood protection, and the negative impacts of environmental degradation, such as toxic exposure to pollution. Her work on water and sanitation services, river remediation, flooding, wetlands governance, and landfill and plastics policy draw on social science theory from political science, urban planning, sociology, and geography. Her research engages broad debates about institutions, collective action, and citizenship.

Her new book, Slow Harms and Citizen Action: Environmental Degradation and Policy Change in Latin American Cities (Oxford Univ Press, 2024) investigates the rise of environmental justice movements to remediate contaminated river basins in the capital regions of Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. In her award winning first book, Water and Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2017), she examines the link between water scarcity in Mexican cities with politicians’ exchange of water services for the vote, and the role of civil society in pressuring for more accountable, and sustainable, local public services. She has written numerous peer-reviewed articles that center the role of citizen participation in natural resource management as well as qualitative methodology, these have appeared in World Development, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Latin American Politics and Society, Journal of Development Studies, among others. New projects focus on the relationship between solid waste, plastics, and the climate crisis. Dr. Herrera is increasingly involved in investigating environmental issues in California, as a board member of LAWaterkeepers which promotes the remediation of the LA River and organizing policy research to inform California plastics policy.

Dr. Herrera received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College.

Herrera also serves as IoES Advisor to Isabel Sheng (Undergraduate Thesis)

Sam! Good (she/her) is a first year graduate student in Civil & Environmental Engineering department. She is a part of the Mahendra lab, where she is researching biodegradation pathways of PFAS. She’s passionate about water reuse, and resource recovery in wastewater! 

She received a B.S. in Civil Engineering from UC Berkeley (’20), and currently works for the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, in their watershed management division. 

Sam loves to rock climb (specifically indoor bouldering!), hike, and hang out with her friends! 

Ivy graduated with a B.S. in Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology and a minor in Environmental Engineering from UCLA in 2020 and is currently a second-year PhD student in Civil & Environmental Engineering. She is a candidate for the Leaders in Sustainability certificate and a trainee in the NSF Research INFEWS (Innovation at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems) fellowship program. Ivy has a passion for mentorship, a spirit for advocacy, and a love for sustainability and all things interdisciplinary. In her free time, she enjoys memory keeping while spending time with loved ones, finding zero-waste DIYs, playing the flute, pogo-sticking, and reading poetry!

Alden Young is assistant professor of African American studies and a faculty member of the International Development Studies program of the UCLA International Institute. A political and economic historian of Africa, he is the author of “Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development and State Formation” (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Young is particularly interested in the ways in which Africans participated in the creation of the current international order and has research interests on both sides of the Red Sea. He has done extensive fieldwork in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

Young’s current research project examines how Sudanese intellectuals and businessmen conceptualized the rise of the Arab Gulf beginning in the 1970s and built economic, political and labor relationships between Sudan and the Gulf region. He is also engaged in two collaborative research projects: a study of post-partition conflicts in the Horn of Africa (e.g., Sudan-South Sudan and Ethiopia-Eritrea) with political scientist Michael Woldemariam, and a study of East African ideas of federation. Along with Nathalie Puetz of NYU Abu Dhabi, Young has been awarded a research grant by the Social Science Research Council to conceptualize the Red Sea as a region of study.

A frequent contributor to international media outlets such as Al Jazeera, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, Young is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton University for the 2019–2020 term.