Shannon’s residency is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Los Angeles District, Regulatory Division. As a senior project manager, she has helped establish and oversees operation of mitigation banks within Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties, in addition to the regulation of waters of the United States under Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 and Section 404 of the Clean Water Act.  Her current research interest is primarily in Arid West aquatic resources, functions, and the policies and politics of natural resource regulations.  Shannon holds a Master of Science in Environmental Health Sciences from UCLA, and a Bachelor of Science from Valparaiso University.

Support from family and community, a love of the out-of-doors,
inquisitiveness and constant tinkering, a learning disability and athletics
were significant influences on Dan’s life.

As a youngster, Dan spent most of his time roaming the hills behind his
home in a small town north of Los Angeles, observing nature and the
critters in it. When he wasn’t in the hills, he was tinkering with motors,
plumbing fixtures and old clocks, trying to figure out how things worked. If it
moved, he took it apart and usually was able to put it together again.

In school, he thrived in classes with problem solving and logic and failed
miserably at anything that required reading, spelling and memorization.
In high school he got awards as the top science and math student in his
class of 300 plus students despite having a third grade reading ability. As a
senior, based on recommendations from his teachers, he got an unsolicited
request to work after school as an engineering aid at a local mechanical
engineering company. That work and the realization that he would
probably not survive college as a biology student, started Dan on a long
road to a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering.

It took Dan seven years to get that degree. In addition to his engineering
studies, significant amounts of time were spent as a track and field athlete,
distance running and race walking. He also worked while in school as a
hydrographer, a breakfast cook for 1,200 dorm students and a carpenter.
Despite these distractions and his reading problems, with the support from
many plus lots of hard work, he got that degree. To the displeasure of his
family, he skipped his college graduation to compete in an invitational track
meet in the LA coliseum.

After graduation, Dan was able to combine his love of the outdoors with his
new degree and went to work for the for the U.S. Forest Service as an
engineer. During his 30 years with the F.S. he worked on 6 forests in
California where he specialized in small water systems and designed and
built horizontal well drilling equipment. He managed organizations of over 400 employees. And somehow, Dan found a way to be successful despite his inabilities.

Once “retired”, he got requests from local small water companies to
operate their system. When someone asks for help, Dan has a hard time
saying no and he took on the operation of eleven systems, including those
of three schools. During those years, he also volunteered hundreds of
hours a year at the local High School, leading an effort to upgrade their
auditorium and training and mentoring students in the art of theater lighting
and sound operation.

One evening, 6 years ago, during the installation of a new-state-of-art
sound system at the school, Dan fell ill and was taken to the hospital. That
next morning, an MRI revealed a small walnut size tumor in the center of
his brain. Two weeks later, after a successful 5 1/2 hour operation, the
surgeon told Dan that he had likely had that mass in his head most, if not
all, of his life and it was in the area where memories are channeled.

During the long months of recovery and now maybe having the new tool of
memory at his disposal, Dan noticed that he could do things that he had not
been able to do before. He could remember in ways that he couldn’t and
he was starting to be able to read. Recognizing that a period of re-training
lay ahead, Dan began reading actively.

With his new found skills, Dan now works part time for the New Jersey
Institute of Technology at a local radio observatory where he does a variety
of technician/engineering tasks for scientists and students doing solar
research. Additionally three years ago, he was convinced by his neighbors
to run for a local political office. After exceeding 50% of the votes by 1 1/2
votes (yes every vote counts!) in a primary election with 3 candidates, Dan
is now a member of the Board of Supervisors setting policy for Inyo County.

A quotation from UCLA basketball coach John Wooden says it all: “Do not
let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”

Amani Itani is a writer at IoES, and a senior at UCLA, double majoring in English and Applied Linguistics. Amani’s main cause is to inform the public about environmental issues, through researched and comprehensible stories. She hopes the public will be proactive towards trending environmental causes in their day-to-day actions.

In addition to being a part of IoES, Amani is presently a writer at The Tab UCLA, and the Social Media Chair of Sigma Tau Delta International English Honors Society at UCLA.

Amani enjoys going on bike rides, attending spoken word poetry, and is currently learning how to play the guitar.

Li Zhang is a third-year doctoral candidate in Environmental Science and Engineering at UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He is on residency with Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, Atmospheric Environment Institute. His work at CAEP includes formulating the national atmospheric pollution prevention and control plan, and investigating atmospheric carrying capacity, atmospheric environmental protection policies and management measures.

He previously completed his Problem Course on “Exhaled Electronic Cigarette Aerosols in a Multizone Indoor Environment”, which is the first study focusing on the transport and mitigation strategies of exhaled e-cig aerosols in a multizone indoor environment.

He receives his Master degree in Environmental Health Science from Harvard University. There he investigated the relationship between pollution emissions from building and the incidence of sick building syndrome in young families. He holds a Bachelor degree in Built Environmental Engineering from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) where he explored topics including indoor air quality and environmental due diligence assessment.

He is looking forward to broadening his environmental knowledge while in the ESE program, and using that skill set in the real world during his time on residency.

Nickie is a proud first generation college student and the first person in her family to ever receive a graduate degree. She is a lover of all things nature, travel, and food.

She earned her B.S. in Biology and Environmental Science from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Nickie deeply values liberal arts education and appreciates how it has shaped her approach to issues in sustainability. Her undergraduate research brought her from a laboratory in  Pennsylvania studying ecotoxicology to the Guanacaste province in Costa Rica, where she studied sustainable beekeeping, to the Wet Tropics of Queensland, Australia where she studied rainforest ecology and socioeconomic values with the School for Field Studies. Nickie then earned her M.S. in Biology at California State University, Northridge, where she studied the relationship between an invasive plant and its symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the Eco-Evo Lab.

For her Problems Course, she is thrilled to be working on Blue Prosperity at UCLA, a collaborative effort between the Waitt Foundation and IoES to provide tools and resources to developing island nations to boost their economic growth while conserving their marine resources. Her role in this project is to develop a toolkit design that distills research from various fields—including business, ecology, fisheries, ecosystem assessments, legal structures and public policy—into a usable format for natural resource managers.

Sharing her joy for science and making higher education accessible to everyone are passions of Nickie’s. While at CSUN, she co-founded Girls in Science and Technology, an after-school enrichment activity aimed at improving the retention of underrepresented women studying science between middle and high school. At UCLA, Nickie is on the executive board of the First-Generation Graduate Student Council and served on the 2018 Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity (EID) Day Planning Committee, for which she co-organized and co-moderated the first-ever First Gen Panel.

She is always curious to learn about the world around her and is driven to find equitable, economical, and environmentally sound solutions to our most pressing challenges. 

Karen is interested in the developmental mechanisms driving morphologic diversification in mammals, and in using non-model mammals as “natural mutants” to investigate questions of import to human health.

Research Interests

Organismal form is the product of a complex suite of interacting developmental processes. Variation in these processes allows mammals to adapt to changing environments, but also generates congenital malformations in humans. Developmental variation therefore presents a unifying concept for evolutionary biology and biomedicine, whose understanding is critical to the success of both fields. My primary research goals are to determine how developmental variation interacts with environmental factors within a species to produce congenital malformations in humans, and among species to generate new evolutionary adaptations in mammals. To pursue these goals, I characterize developmental variation across biological scales, and interpret how this variation drives evolution and malformations in form. I incorporate data from fields from paleontology to mathematics to genomics to developmental biology. I also study multiple model and non-model mammals (e.g., mouse, bat, cat, deer, horse, pig, opossum). I use this approach to investigate three major topics: mammalian limb evolution and development, major evolutionary transformations during mammalian evolution, and mammalian sensory system evolution.