Peter is a second year Master of Urban and Regional Planning student in the Luskin School of Public Policy. His interest in water stems from his roots as an environmental activist. His professional career focused on community organizing and policy advocacy. At American Rivers, Peter supported communities across the nation in protecting their local water resources and most recently at TreePeople, he engaged Los Angeles residents in fostering the urban forest and taking steps to capture storm water.  At UCLA Peter works as a Graduate Student Researcher in the Luskin Center for Innovation where he has contributed to research on water affordability in the state of California.

Prior to Luskin, Katsura worked for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, Government of Japan, Tokyo, Japan, for seven years. He started his career as a public offer for reviewing and approving new entrants into telecommunication business in the Telecommunications Policy Division. After that, he promoted overseas expansion of Japanese broadcasting content in the Promotion for Content Distribution Division. He set up a fund which supports localization of Japanese content through dubbing or subtitling and improved the process of licensing copyrights of Japanese content by building a one-stop center to license copyrights. Then, he managed local public finance coordination in the Local Public Finance Bureau. He also did the job of approving new business such as dealing with new insurance products of Japan Post Insurance, a privatized government-regulated company.

J. Nicholas Entrikin is Professor of Geography (Emeritus), UCLA, and Professor of Sociology (Emeritus), University of Notre Dame. He has served as UCLA’s Vice Provost for International Studies and Director of the UCLA International Institute and as the Vice President for Internationalization at the University of Notre Dame. He chaired the UCLA Chancellor’s Task Force on Environmental Studies, the recommendations of which led to the creation of the Institute of the Environment. His research is in the area of cultural geography and the philosophy of geography and he has written on themes concerning the relationship between environmentalism and cultural identity, e.g., on the preservation of ancestral landscapes and regional culture. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, and a CNRS visiting director of research at IRSAM-SET, Université de Pau et Pays de L’Adour. He has published numerous articles in international geography and sociology journals and has authored and edited books in human geography including: The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity; Reflections on Richard Hartshorne’s ‘The Nature of Geography’; Regions: Critical Essays in Human Geography; The Marshall Plan Today: Model and Metaphor; and Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities.

Yuta Higuchi is currently a second-year graduate student at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He is doing his master degree in Public Policy. His research area is environmental policy, especially related to climate change. His studies include Statistics, Economics as a basement for his research and his future career.

Higuchi joined the Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan in 2013 and most recently he subsequently served as a section chief for Climate Change Policy Division, Global Environment Bureau from 2015 to 2017. He launched ‘Cool Choice Promotion Team’ (Jun 2016) headed by the Minister of the Environment to advance the national campaign for global warming countermeasures, and gained support to promote the campaign from more than 100 companies. Prior to the position, he was a section chief on International Strategy Division, Global Environment Bureau for three months. Before assigning the position, he spent a year as a legal officer for General Affairs Division, Minister’s Secretariat.

Higuchi received his Bachelor of Laws degree from Keio University in Japan in 2013.

Andy Currier is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a certificate in Global Environment and Resources. He is primarily interested in evaluating strategies for developing countries to adapt to climate change with a focus on Sub-Saharan African food systems and community driven development. Andy has spent time working in Malawi on a variety of youth, health and agriculture projects in the past and a year at the USAID Bureau of Food Security Service Center. A 2016 graduate of Colby College, Andy double majored in Environmental Policy and Government where his honors thesis evaluated the Tuberculosis healthcare system in the Kasungu region of Malawi. This past summer, he interned at Landesa conducting research and writing policy briefs on the intersection of land rights, climate change adaptation and youth. In his free time Andy will be in the Eastern Sierras skiing and hiking with his dogs.

Asami is a second-year public policy graduate student at Luskin School, and is interested in Science/Technology, and sustainability issues from the perspective of the government.

Before Asami came to UCLA to study public policy for her Master degree, she was working for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan for eight years. From 2010 to 2014, she worked for the Science and Technology Divisions, launching and managing some programs to fund universities and research institutions, particularly in the area of basic research and nanotechnology/materials science. While she was in the International Education Division from 2014 to 2016, she worked to improve English education for Japanese children and Japanese education for foreign children in Japan. In 2016, she then temporarily transferred to the Cabinet Office to facilitate the Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (CSTI), which sets budget and policy guidelines for Science and Technology. The council is comprised by the Prime Minister, relevant Ministers, and experts.

Prior to that, she earned her associate degree in Electronics and Information Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Ishikawa College, and then her Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electrics and Materials Physics from Osaka University in Japan. Her research there was about improving the efficiency of solar cells using new methods.

Asami is excited to join this program and work with her cohorts to tackle real policy issues governments are facing. Especially, as she believes that science and technology play an important role to solve many issues, she is looking forward to examining how technologies could contribute to countries’ sustainability.

Dr. Raffaella D’Auria is a computational scientist at the UCLA Institute for Digital Research and Education with expertise in the area of computational chemistry and atmospheric sciences. She has been teaching environmental courses for both the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is also frequently presenting seminars on high performance computing topics. She is currently one of the faculty, and the academic coordinator, for the UCLA Freshman Cluster, “Food, a lens for the Environment and Sustainability”, co-sponsored by Undergraduate Education Initiative and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Along with using computational chemistry tools to investigate atmospherically relevant phenomena, she is currently undertaking research in curricular modification that might affect students’ success and information retention in science education. Prior to joining UCLA Dr. D’Auria was a postdoctoral fellow for the Department of Chemistry and the AirUCI at UCI. Dr. D’Auria earned a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences at UCLA and a Laurea in Physics at the University of Rome, “La Sapienza”.

Publications:

Olivieri, G.; K. M. Parry; R. D’Auria; D. J. Tobias; M. A. Brown, Specific Anion Effects on Na+ Adsorption at the Aqueous Solution–Air Interface: MD Simulations, SESSA Calculations, and Photoelectron Spectroscopy Experiments, J. Phys. Chem. B, 122, 910-918, 2018.

Vincent, J. C.; S. M. Matt; B. M. Rankin; R. D’Auria; J. A. Freites; D. Ben-Amotz; D. J. Tobias, Specific ion interactions with aromatic rings in aqueous solutions: Comparison of molecular dynamics simulations with a thermodynamic solute partitioning model and Raman hydration shell spectroscopy, Chem. Phys. Lett., 638, 1-8, 2015.

Valiev, M.; R. D’Auria; D. J. Tobias, Interactions of Cl- and OH Radical in Aqueous Solution, J. Phys. Chem. A, 113, 8823–8825, 2009.

D’Auria, R.; D. J. Tobias, Relation between Surface Tension and Ion Adsorption at the Air−Water Interface: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation Study, J. Phys. Chem. A, 113, 7286–7293, 2009.

Brown, M. A.; R. D’Auria; I.-F. W. Kuo; M. J. Krisch; D. E. Starr; H. Bluhm; D. J. Tobias; and J. C. Hemminger; Ion spatial distribution at the liquid-vapor interface of aqueous halide solutions, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 10, 4778-4784, 2008.

D’Auria, R.; I.-F. W. Kuo; D. J. Tobias; An ab initio study molecular dynamics study of the solvated OHCl- complex: Implications for the atmospheric oxidation of chloride anion to molecular chlorine, J. Phys. Chem. A, 112, 4644-4650, 2008.

Krisch*, M. J., R. D’Auria*, M. A. Brown, D. J. Tobias, J. C. Hemminger, M. Ammann, D. E. Starr, and H. Bluhm; The effect of an organic surfactant on the vapor/liquid interface of an electrolyte solution, J. Phys. Chem. C, 111, 13497-13509, 2007. (*These authors contributed equally)

D’Auria, R.; R. P. Turco; and K. Houk; Effects of Hydration on the Properties of Protonated-Water-Nitric Acid Clusters, J. Phys. Chem. A, 108, 3756–3765, 2004.

Hamill, P.; R. D’Auria; and R. P. Turco; An empirical approach to the nucleation of sulfuric acid droplets in the atmosphere, Ann. Geophys., 46, 331–340, 2003.

D’Auria, R.; and R. P. Turco; Ionic clusters in the polar winter stratosphere, Geophys. Res. Lett., 28, 3871–3874, 2001.

 

Miyuki started her career at the Information and Communication Electronics Division in METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry), for the Japanese national government. She supported Japanese companies that have been improving their energy efficient technologies. She was also engaged in electronics recycling system. She worked in three other departments after that, improving her professional skills to coordinate variety of projects, such as promoting Japan as an ideal destination for foreign direct investment. Prior to that, she earned her Bachelor of Agriculture degree in Forestry from University of Tokyo. Working at Forest Hydrology and Erosion Control Engineering Laboratory, Miyuki examined nitrogen deposition and transformation dynamics along the canopy–soil continuum of a suburban forest.

Miyuki joined UCLA Luskin School in order to improve her analytical skills in the field of sustainable economic development. Her research field varies from globalization to environmental economics. This spring, she organized Japan Trip 2018 as a co-representative. In this study trip, she led a cultural tourism & sustainable community team. In her free time, Miyuki loves to play outside with her three-year-old daughter.