Anna graduated as a Psychology major, Civic Engagement and Entrepreneurship double minor. She is interested in the relationship between businesses, people and the environment. While in school, Anna was a Resident Assistant on the Hill and was passionate about helping new students navigate their way through UCLA. She dreams of someday going to all the National Parks and hiking the Grand Canyon.
Currently, Anna is working as an Impact Partnerships Coordinator at Pledgeling.
Willem is a student in the professional Master of Architecture program at UCLA. He is particularly interested in urban design as the intersection of landscape, architecture, history and sustainability in the built environment. Willem is completing the IoES Leaders in Sustainability Graduate Certificate, and currently researches biophilic office design for the Corporate Partners Program.
Willem previously double-majored in English and the History of Art & Architecture at UCSB with a minor in Spatial Studies. Since then, he has worked in architecture firms in the Los Angeles area and published multiple articles on urbanism. After UCLA, Willem looks forward to helping redesign a more sustainable and equitable Southern California.
Gionatan Tecle was born and raised in Italy by migrant parents who fled Eritrea during the civil war. After completing his BFA in Cinematic Art at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, he worked as a camera operator for five years and developed a strong passion for experimental narratives and documentaries. He holds an MFA degree at UCLA in Cinematography and uses the documentary medium to explore the visual language of images and conceptual approaches to human behavior.
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an Associate Professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television where she heads the MFA Directing Documentary concentration. She has been making documentary films that focus on gender and representation for nearly two decades, starting with a 1999 experimental documentary about a blow-up doll (which screened at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, among other venues). Guevara-Flanagan’s documentary and experimental films have screened at the Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, and HotDocs film festivals and the Getty Museum. Her work has been broadcast on PBS and the Sundance Channel, received numerous awards, and been funded by ITVS, the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Institute, Latino Public Broadcasting and California Humanities.
Jasper Kok was born in the Netherlands, where he obtained a B.S. in physics at Leiden University. He then moved to the United States for graduate school, and obtained his PhD in Applied Physics from the University of Michigan in 2009, for which he received a Distinguished Dissertation Award. He then took an Advanced Study Program postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, followed by an NSF Climate and Large-Scale Dynamics postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. Jasper joined the faculty at the department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA in 2013, was awarded an NSF CAREER grant in 2016, received tenure in 2017, and the Henry Houghton Early Career award from the American Meteorological Society in 2019. He is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed articles.
Jasper’s research focuses on physical processes of direct relevance to climate and planetary sciences. In particular, he has made fundamental advances in understanding the emission and the resulting climate impacts of desert dust, which accounts for the majority of particulate matter by mass in the atmosphere. He has also applied some of these advances to understanding the mysteries of sand transport and dust emission in Mars’ dilute atmosphere and on Saturn’s fascinatingly Earth-like moon Titan.
After graduating from the University of California, Davis, advised by Prof. Paul Ullrich, I joined Prof. Alex Hall’s research team as a postdoctoral researcher in January 2017.
My doctoral research mainly focused on regional climate and modeling over California, and precipitation projections over the western U.S. under climate change. Specifically, I highlighted the value of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) with variable-resolution enabled in regional climate studies (Huang et al., 2016, Huang and Ullrich, 2016). Using this model, I have also quantified the impacts of human-induced climate change on both mean climatology and extreme precipitation events (Huang and Ullrich, 2017). My academic background also includes geographic information systems and remote sensing.
My current interests include impacts and attribution of human-induced climate change and climate modeling, especially at regional scales, such as the anthropogenic warming impacts on extreme precipitation events. Increasingly, efforts are being made to understand climate change impacts at regional scales so that stakeholders and policymakers can formulate effective adaptation and mitigation strategies. I am particularly motivated to improve our understanding of complex regional climates and the impacts of future changes in extreme climate events, with potential interdisciplinary collaborations.
Recently, my research focuses on the anthropogenic warming impacts on California snowpack and flood events over the Sierra Nevada under both normal and extreme wet years (in the case of the recent period 2015–2017). The results from this work will help diagnose the impacts of climate change on the water resources and allow water mangers to identify possible strategies to manage extreme conditions. On the other hand, due to the complex terrain over the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and other mountainous areas, the orographic precipitation is still not well resolved at fine scales ( less than 10 km) in up-to-date downscaling simulations. I am investigating how to adjust parameters in models’ microphysics schemes to improve their representation of precipitation over complex topography at fine scales.
My research efforts also include the exploration of changes in large-scale water vapor transport patterns, particularly in the form of atmospheric rivers, under the warming climate. This work involves the detection of modulated water vapor influx patterns, the resulting changes in precipitation extremes, and the features of atmospheric rivers at fine scales under different warming scenarios.
I am an applied climate scientist with the overarching goal of increasing climate resilience and sustainability in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
My recent research and interests focus on changes in the California hydrological cycle — particularly how snowpack, precipitation, and extreme events may change in the future, and the impacts of these changes on the region’s water resources, energy security, and agricultural productivity. This work involves analyzing global climate models and conducting cutting-edge regional climate simulations using supercomputers.
Recognizing that we live in integrated physical and social systems, I am passionate about extending the results of regional climate simulations to practitioners, policy makers, and officials to guide decision-making and planning efforts across LA. I believe that the co-development of climate resilience solutions between scientists and stakeholders is necessary for mitigating and adapting to changing environmental conditions.
I obtained a PhD in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from UCLA and a BS in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Before returning to UCLA in 2017, I spent two years at the RAND Corporation in their Washington, DC, office, where I served as Program Manager for the NOAA Mid-Atlantic RISA program. Although I am an east coast native, I happily enjoy living and working in sunny and vibrant LA.