Evelyn is interested in creating spaces for researchers, communities, government, and tech to share knowledge, build trust, and work collectively to cultivate healthier and more just environments. With an Environmental Science bachelor’s degree from UCLA, she cares deeply about the entanglements of environmental data and knowledge circulation in addressing global climate problems. Currently, at the ClimateWorks Foundation, she is exploring how to center diverse perspectives and priorities to create durable, nimble climate strategies amid an increasingly complex, dynamic, and fragmented landscape.
Outside of work, she designs operational and collaborative systems at climate orgs, collects words, and imagines pluralistic worlds at are.na and Substack.
Cartoon is a senior double majoring in economics and human biology & society with a minor in environmental systems & society. She is interested in the intersection of sustainability and business, especially in corporate sustainability and impact investing. Through the Corporate Partners Program, she will be researching the effects of the events in 2020 on corporate sustainability reporting. She is also interested in the intersection of sustainability and healthcare, and as UCLA Health’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative Fellow, she is working to help reduce the carbon footprint of UCLA’s healthcare system in alignment with the UC-wide goal of being carbon neutral by 2025.
Last year Cartoon interned at LA Cleantech Incubator where she focused on evaluating seed stage greentech and circular economy startups. She holds a LEED Green Associate credential and is currently working with LEED Lab to help certify UCLA buildings under LEED O+M. On campus, she currently serves as the vice president of finance of Bruin Medical Entrepreneurs and CUBE.
In her free time, Cartoon enjoys yoga, national parks, and film photography.
Matthew Swanson is a PhD student in the English Department. His areas of focus are 20th/21st-century American fiction and environmental humanities, with particular interest in resource extraction and consumption.
Jesse’s research concerns global patterns of projected future increases to extreme precipitation. In a warming climate, almost all regions are projected to experience increases in the most intense precipitation, which is of high relevance for future flood risk mitigation. Jesse’s research aims to develop a theory for what controls the rate of increase of extremes and why some regions are likely to experience greater increases than others. He is also attempting to develop an “emergent constraint” for projected increases: Because climate models inevitably contain errors, can we use known biases in climate models, based on historical simulations, to set constraints on their future projections of extreme precipitation? His research is part of the “Identifying Robust Cloud Feedbacks in Observations and Models” project, funded by the Department of Energy.
Jesse obtained his PhD from the University of Manchester, U.K., in 2014. His Ph.D. was part of the Diamet project, concerned with the improved forecasting of mesoscale precipitation features within extratropical cyclones. Prior to coming to UCLA in 2017, his research was predominantly in mesoscale meteorology. In particular, he studied how mountain ranges modify precipitation within synoptic-scale features, such as extratropical cyclones and monsoons. This issue is highly relevant to future climate projections. Because climate models are too coarse to resolve mesoscale and orographic features, how will regions with complex terrain, such as California, respond to large-scale climate change?
Miguel A. Garcia-Garibay received his B.S. degree from the University of Michoacan in Mexico and his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. He was a postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University before joining the faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA where he rose through the Faculty ranks and is now a Distinguished Professor.
After serving as Vice Chair for Education and as the Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, in 2016 he was appointed Dean of Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Sciences. He has served in the editorial boards of the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry, Crystal Growth & Design, and was an associate editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society from 2009 to 2018. He served two terms in the Chemical Sciences Roundtable of the National Academies and is now a member of the Advisory Committee of the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate.
Garcia-Garibay achieved an international reputation for work in reactive intermediates, solid-state organic chemistry, photochemistry, green chemistry, and crystalline molecular machines. He has authored over 230 articles and delivered over 450 lectures worldwide. Among other honors, he is a fellow of the AAAS and has been awarded the American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellowship, a Creativity Award from the National Science Foundation, the 2013 Inter-American Photochemical Society Award, the 2015 ACS Cope Scholar Award, and the 2016 UCLA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award. In 2019 he was elected Fellow of the American Chemical Society and in 2020 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ben is a water resources engineer with a background in hydrology, groundwater and coastal hydrodynamics. In collaborating with a premier group of climate scientists, he aims to combine his background with state-of-the-art climate analysis to help address what California’s water future will look like.
Questions he intends to address include: i) how will California’s streamflow patterns vary during future drought and wet weather conditions, ii) how will shifts in climate and streamflow patterns translate to changing water supply reliability for Southern California, and iii) how will California’s floodplains change, particularly due to atmospheric rivers, and what might that mean for flood mitigation infrastructure (i.e. reservoir capacity).
Ben joined Alex Hall’s research group April 2020. He obtained his B.S. in Hydrogeology at The University of Texas at Austin, his PhD in Civil/Environmental Engineering at Rice University and has worked at the EPA of Texas (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) and Woodard and Curran (formerly RMC Water and Environment).
Ben’s undergraduate research included analysis of the impact of different vegetation on groundwater recharge versus evapotranspiration during severe drought. His PhD involved extensive flood risk analysis, including evaluations of how changes in precipitation, land cover and sea level rise could impact flooding. In his Ph.D., he also evaluated how different tropical storm and hurricane characteristics correlate to their rainfall-runoff and storm surge flood response.
Sophia is an environmentalist, optimist, and journalist. She has over seven years of professional broadcast experience, ranging from video production, to podcast work, to oversight of UCLA’s radio station. Sophia produces content focused on communicating narratives of hope and change for the environment. As an undergraduate Public Affairs major, Environmental Systems and Society Minor, and Global Food Initiative Fellow, her environmental interests lie primarily in the intersections among media, research, policy, and dialogue.
