Rhianna is interested in cooperative work between governments and communities to manage natural resources. At CCSC, she is documenting the processes used to develop an advanced energy community infrastructure within the City of Claremont, CA and ultimately produce a set of tools that can used to translate and replicate the model in other cities. Rhianna has an MS in Environmental and Energy Policy from the Social Science Department of Michigan Technological University as well as experience working with communities on environmental and economic projects in Colorado and Michigan.
Erik Porse
Erik is a systems analyst focusing on resource management in urban and natural systems. He uses modeling to inform infrastructure planning. Erik specializes in leading multidisciplinary applied research projects and is the principal architect for the Artes model of urban water resources management in Los Angeles County. Erik has a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Masters degree in Public Policy. He holds appointments at UCLA as an Assistant Adjunct Professor and Sacramento State University, where he is a Research Engineer in the Office of Water Programs and the US EPA Region 9 Environmental Finance Center.
From 2014 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral scholar and Associate Research Director at CCSC. Before returning to graduate school, he worked as an adjunct professor and leader for Earlham College’s study abroad program in Tanzania, a science policy analyst, a systems engineer for the United Nations, and an intelligence analyst for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
Jessica Cattelino
Jessica Cattelino studies and teaches about sociocultural life in the contemporary United States. She is currently a PI in the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS).
Her research focuses on economy, nature, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. Her first book, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008; winner of the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of North America), examines the cultural, political, and economic stakes of tribal casinos for Florida Seminoles. Currently, she is writing an ethnography about the cultural value of water in the Florida Everglades, with a focus on the Seminole Big Cypress Reservation and the nearby agricultural town of Clewiston. She also is collaborating with photographer Adam Nadel on a museum exhibition about the inextricability of people and nature in the Everglades.
Her current research is funded by the National Science Foundation (Law and Social Sciences), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. Additionally, she is funded through participation in a National Science Foundation Long Term Ecological Network on the Florida Coastal Everglades, for which she is undertaking wildly interdisciplinary collaboration as a co-author of a paper on phosphorus and will conduct ethnographic research on the social life of a stormwater treatment area.
Jenny Aleman-Zometa
Jenny Aleman-Zometa is an IoES ESE alum.
She is currently a Project Manager for the Regulatory Division at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Previously, she was the Program Director for the Los Angeles River State Park Partners. For her dissertation, she is studying urban nature parks in Los Angeles with Dr. Richard Ambrose.
Today over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, people are moving towards cities and urban parks will become the spaces where people will most often interact with nature. At the same time, parks can help with conservation by creating new nature stewards, by being linkages between other urban green spaces, and providing habitat for migrating birds. These urban nature parks present this tremendous opportunity to meet so many different needs, but can they? As an ecologist and a city dweller I am curious to learn how.
Samantha Ong
Samantha Ong is interested in the application of data analysis and visualization tools to humanities research. She is an aspiring law student hoping to work in the fields of technology policy and entrepreneurship law.
Lucy Seena K Lin
Lucy Seena K Lin is an artist, urbanist, and scholar-activist who recently received her Master’s Degree in Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA. Her research focus on social and spatial politics, creative strategies and resilient cities expands the understanding of urban conditions by weaving together art-based practices and urban theory.
She received her BA from UC Berkeley in Fine Arts. Her prior experiences span the realms of studio practice; visual arts programming; artist, nonprofit and community development; and municipal arts administration and cultural policy. Ms. Lin has worked with a number of San Francisco Bay Area institutions including the San Francisco Arts Commission, City of Berkeley, ProArts in Oakland, Intersection for the Arts, Chinese Culture Foundation, Kearny Street Workshop, and the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation. She has served on juries for organizations including Root Division, SOMArts Cultural Center, and California College of the Arts. Her written work can be found in the Fall 2016 issue of BOOM: A Journal of California and the Urban Humanities Institute Mexico City forthcoming book. She is currently working on the creative placemaking project, Boyle Heights en Movimiento, which received a 2016 LA Department of Cultural Affairs Arts Activation grant award.
Tyler Huxtable
Tyler is a UCLA graduate (BA English, Linguistics) concerned with the language and framing of environmental stories. A financial market aficionado, perpetual news watcher, and sometimes law professional, he has an eclectic set of passions that inspired him to join the LENS community. He obsesses over the latest bestselling novels, codes small programs for fun, and studies invented and reinvented languages. He believes no interests contradict; there are only unexplored opportunities in the in-between spaces.
Osceola Ward
Osceola Ward is a recent MA graduate of the UCLA African American Studies program. During his tenure at UCLA, Ward completed the Leaders in Sustainability certificate program through the University’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability (IoES). It was on his journey to obtaining the BA in African American Studies at Howard University that he grew interested in the intersections of race, class, and the environment. He began to explore the disconnect between environmental health, food access, and socioeconomic status, while encouraging Black and Brown communities to reclaim their space in nature. Ward’s close work with local non-profit’s to expose marginalized youth to the outdoors earned him a fellowship from the Los Angeles Sustainability Collective.
Through this work, he has found an opportunity to combine his goals for communal advancement with his desire to provide sustainable solutions to the health and environmental crises of these vulnerable populations. Ward has since returned to the Bay Area where he is deeply engaged in movements for food justice, environmental justice and health equity. His holistic approach to pursuing justice centers compassion, mindfulness, and mutual understanding. Ward hopes to advance intergenerational, trans-communal and interfaith dialogue in all the work that he does.
In 2015, Osceola earned his official certification as a lead instructor for Outward Bound Adventures, a non-profit organization dedicated to exposing underserved students in the Los Angeles area to the outdoors. Through this work, he has found an opportunity to combine his goals for communal advancement with his desire to provide sustainable solutions to the health and environmental crises of these vulnerable populations. Ward has led numerous hikes, and during these tours he imparts wisdom based on knowledge gained from the graduate classroom, travel, and community involvement. He weaves together his theoretical framework around environmental racism and his own praxis of engagement which creates a safe space for reciprocal learning and growth between himself and his students. Ward was featured in a recent Fusion article, entitled “A New Kind of Role Model” for his outstanding work.
For more information about the work that Osceola Ward is doing, visit him on Twitter and Instagram @oskibloomin or email him at osceolaulimwengu@gmail.com.
Gregory Toy
Gregory Toy is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at UCLA. His research interests include Asian American literature and culture, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies.
Rachel Lee
Rachel Lee is the author of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality and Posthuman Ecologies (2014) winner of the Best Book in Culture Studies Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Her scholarship draws on critical methods from race/ethnic studies in conjunction with theories of gender and sexuality, to examine the specific interfaces and choreographies of stand-up comedy, dance, new media/digital technology, and literature, most recently as they reflect on the life sciences. She heads the Center for the Study of Women’s research project on “Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Toxic Exposures,” which maps the way in which women have been enrolled, both as scientists and non-scientists, in chemical experiments since WWII, and aims to increase the chemical literacy of scholars in gender/sexuality studies.