Tomás is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He holds a Ph.D. in Government and Public Policy from the University of Arizona. Tomás is interested in governance of shared natural resources, with particular concern for how groups of actors address different collective action problems. His research combines tools to study institutions with social network analysis. Specifically, Tomás is interested in how actors such as governments, NGOs, private industries, and individuals create institutional arrangements to govern resources that extend beyond multiple political and geographical boundaries.
At IoES, Tomás is studying the design features of water funds, a particular model of payment for ecosystem services. Tomás studies the institutional design of multiple water funds implemented in Latin America, where these mechanisms have had a long record of success in provisioning watershed services.
Selected Publications
Olivier, Tomás. (forthcoming). “How Do Institutions Address Collective-Action Problems? Bridging and Bonding in Institutional Design.” Political Research Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912918784199
Holly Jean Buck is a postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She’s interested in how communities can be involved in the design of emerging environmental technologies. She works at the interface of environmental sociology, international development, and science and technology studies. Her diverse research interests include agroecology and carbon farming, new energy technologies, artificial intelligence, and the restoration of California’s Salton Sea.
At present, she is studying how technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere might affect landscapes in the central US, and how policy for scaling up carbon dioxide removal can be designed for community benefit. Her book After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration examines best-case scenarios for carbon removal. She has written on several aspects of climate engineering, including humanitarian and development approaches to geoengineering, gender considerations, and human rights issues.
Prior to her academic life, she has worked as a foreign affairs analyst, a geospatial technician for a remote sensing company, and a creative writing teacher. She holds a doctorate in Development Sociology from Cornell University and a MSc in Human Ecology from Lund University, Sweden.
Jesse grew up in rural New York. Years spent scrambling over rocks and rooting through leaves looking for salamanders fostered a deep love for the natural world and a curiosity about the processes that shape it. For college, they traveled to the rocky coasts of New England to pursue a degree in Geology–Biology at Brown University. At Brown, they worked in a terrestrial biogeochemistry lab exploring plant–soil interactions, focusing particularly on seedling uptake of the plant-important nutrient phosphorus.
In their doctoral work at Stanford University, they investigated climatic controls on soil development and nutrient cycling in ecosystems. As a postdoc, they worked in a lab that specializes in applying isotopic methods to understanding paleoclimates. Jesse uses their background in terrestrial ecosystems to investigate climatic controls on biological communities. For this work, they use a combination of isotopic climate proxies, paleopollen records, and geomorphological studies.
Currently, Jesse is a Diversity Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor at SUNY Cortland in Central New York. They continue to collaborate with researchers at Stanford and UCLA expanding on their previous work and supporting undergraduate students’ exploration of the scientific process.
In addition to their scientific pursuits, Jesse volunteers with CDLS focusing on scientific outreach in the broader Los Angeles community and to the Central New York community.
Comfort is interested in environmental justice and the politics of storytelling, particularly in conversation with indigeneity and global politics in postcolonial spaces. She has also worked on UCLA’s Climate Change curricular innovations program.
Tiger is interested in environmental issues like climate change and species diversity. In Summer 2017, he co-directed a short documentary about photovoltaic power generation in rural areas. Tiger has worked as a television and broadcast journalist, and also has experience with basic mapping and animation in AE.
Claire’s research focuses on narrative strategies of the posthuman. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota, where she also earned a graduate minor in Sustainable Agricultural Systems. A former editor for Eater Minneapolis, her food writing has also been published in Grist, GOOD, Civil Eats, and the Bon Appétit website.
Jaqueline has degrees in biology and journalism, and has worked as a reporter at RBS Media Company in Brazil since 2013, covering environmental and political topics, and working on investigative projects about local environmental issues. She is fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and has experience filming and editing short videos, and broadcasting live Twitter and Facebook.
Robin’s primary area of research is early modern literature, with a focus on travel, cultural contact, and Anglo-Spanish connections. He is also engaged with environmental research and community engagement, and is interested in food activism, environmental justice, and relations between the human and nonhuman. In 2015, Robin taught a course on food justice to undergraduates at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, which used narrative non-fiction, podcasts, and online video to examine and reimagine the larger cultural forces that condition what and how we eat.
