Dr. Juan Lora is a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA studying atmospheric dynamics. Juan completed his B.S. at USC and his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona.
Naarai Hernandez
Naarai Hernandez is an undergraduate student at Santa Monica College who is majoring in Agricultural Engineering. Her interest is in sustainable agriculture. Naarai was selected for a competitive Santa Monica College-UCLA Summer Research Scholars program and has continued with research in climate science and environmental science at UCLA. She has served as a Garden Coordinator in Boyle Heights, where she works with youth and is a facilitator, as well as outreach and lesson preparation, supervision, instruction, and administrative work.
Justine Kimball
Dr. Justine Kimball was a researcher at UCLA. She now is theNational Coral Reef Monitoring Program Coordinator at NOAA. Justine completed her B.S. the University of California Santa Barbara and her Ph.D. at Stanford University. She also held a John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship with the Navy focused on climate change and ocean impacts, prior to joining NOAA.
Whitney Doss
Dr. Whitney Doss was a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA. She now is a Physical Scientist at the Department of Energy, working in their Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Whitney completed her B.S. at Washington and Lee University and her Ph.D. at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was also a postdoctoral researcher at the European Institute of Marine Sciences prior to joining the Department of Energy.
Hayley Bricker
Hayley received her BA, MS, and PhD degrees from the Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences department at UCLA. She is now a science communicator & strategist living in Seattle. In her spare time, Hayley enjoys reading, astronomy, playing the harp, trail running, and being in the mountains.
Atreyee Bhattacharya
Dr. Atreyee Bhattarcharya was a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA. She now is a faculty member in the Environmental Studies department, a faculty affiliate of the Center for Asian Studies and research affiliate of INSTAAR at the University of Colorado, Boulder; she also advises the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore India regarding long-term climate and environmental variability in central India.
Atreyee received her Ph.D. from the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at Harvard in 2012 and thereafter spent a year and a half in science writing engagements that involved the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the United States Department of Energy’s national laboratory (PNNL) and numerous earth and climate science focussed magazines and websites. Atreyee joined the faculty of North Carolina State University for a year in 2013 and soon after joined the group in 2014.
Atreyee focuses on quantifying the impact of decadal and multidecadal scale climate variability in semi-arid regions and impacts of climate variability on environmental resource availability. Atreyee also develops methods that improve the use of corals cores as environmental archives. She is completing her work on chemical oceanography.
Atreyee is active in advising climate adaptation practices in India, science communication efforts in the US and also in India, supporting undergraduate STEM research; she enjoys creating recipes and blogging about it and traveling to new places for fieldwork, conferences, and collaborations. She loves to wear sarees.
Jamie Lucarelli
Dr. Jamie Lucarelli is an Earth Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, specializing in stable and nuclear isotope geochemistry with applications in nuclear nonproliferation and environmental studies. Completed in 2022, her Ph.D in Geochemistry focused on two advanced isotopic systems, ∆47 and ∆48, to investigate equilibrium and kinetic isotope effects in carbon dioxide and dissolved inorganic carbon. She received a B.S. in Chemistry and M.S. in Geochemistry, both from UCLA.
Dr. Lucarelli is passionate about enhancing fairness and science for all within STEM fields and serves as an Early Career Fellow at the UCLA CDLS. Her commitment to excellence has been recognized through awards including the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards (IRACDA) Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, and the UC Office of the President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship.
Neil Garg
Professor Neil Garg received a B.S. in Chemistry from New York University where he did undergraduate research. During his undergraduate years, he spent several months in Strasbourg, France while conducting research at Université Louis Pasteur as an NSF REU Fellow. Garg obtained his Ph.D. in 2005 from the California Institute of Technology. He then went to UC Irvine as an NIH Postdoctoral Scholar. Garg joined the faculty at UCLA in 2007. He currently serves as Faculty-in-Residence in the UCLA undergraduate community.
Hosea Nelson
Professor Hosea Nelson is a faculty member at UCLA in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Professor Nelson started his academic career at City College of San Francisco before transferring to UC Berkeley, where he received a B.S. degree in Chemistry in 2004. He then joined the Panasonic Energy Solutions Laboratory as a research assistant, where he developed technologies for lithium ion batteries and methanol fuel cells. From 2007-2012 Professor Nelson completed a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology as an NSF Predoctoral Fellow and a Ford Foundation Fellow. He then was a UNCF / Merck Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, before joining the faculty at UCLA in 2014. Broadly speaking, Prof. Nelson’s research program is focused on the development of enabling technologies for chemical synthesis and biology.
Leo Pham
Leo is a third year undergraduate student at UCLA pursuing dual degrees in Chinese and Earth and Environmental Science. He recently collaborated with other undergraduate students to investigate climate change impacts during a period in Earth’s history characterized by an increase in global average temperature with a massive input of carbon dioxide. He is passionate about issues related to sustainability, climate change, and water quality management. Leo is also a Gates Millennium Scholar! He hopes to pursue a career as an environmental scientist. In his free time, Leo enjoys reading detective fiction.