Anahid Nersessian is Associate Professor in the Department of English. She is the author of Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard, 2015) and The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago, 2020). She is also the editor of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s long poem, Laon and Cythna; or, the Revolution of the Golden City (Broadview, 2016) and, with Nan Z. Da, founding co-editor of the Thinking Literature series published by the University of Chicago Press. Her writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, the Los Angeles Review of Books, PMLA, Public Books, and the Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, among other venues. She is a former managing editor of the journal Environmental Humanities.
Robin (Lauren) Derby is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Director of the Caribbean Program in the International Institute.
Her research has treated everyday life under regimes of state terror, the long durée social history of the Haitian and Dominican border, and how notions of race, national identity and witchcraft have been articulated in popular media such as rumor, food and animals. Her publications include The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo, which won the Bolton-Johnson Prize, co-won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award, and received honorable mention for the Bryce Wood Book Award (Spanish edition 2016); (co-editor) Activating the Past: History and Memory in the Black Atlantic World; (co-editor) The Dominican Republic Reader; and articles on Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Her current book project, which considers werewolves in light of the “animal turn” is based on oral testimony of demonic animal apparitions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and is entitled Fera Bestia: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands.
Eric Daniel Fournier is the Research Director at the California Center for Sustainable Communities (CCSC) within UCLA’s Institute for the Environment and Sustainability. Eric’s background is in the fields of spatial modeling, life cycle assessment, and energy and water systems analyses. Generally, his work focuses on the application of information technologies, and the quantitative methods that they enable, to the resolution of complex environmental problems.
Eric obtained his B.S. in Environmental Science at Bucknell University (2008), where he also minored in Economics and Chemistry. He also holds a M.E.Sc. from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (2010), a M.A. in Geography from the University of California at Santa Barbara (2014), and a Ph.D. in Environmental Informatics from UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management (2015).
Dr. Eric Fournier- CV 2020
Jennifer Jay’s research integrates field and laboratory approaches to better understand the geochemical and microbial processes that govern the fate of contaminants in the environment. Specific interests include the geochemical and microbial methylation of mercury by sulfate-reducing bacteria (the end-product of this reaction, methylmercury, is a potent neurotoxin with a very strong tendency to bioaccumulate), the mobilization of arsenic in groundwater, and the persistence of fecal indicator bacteria and pathogens in beach sediment. Understanding the cycling of contaminants in aquatic systems allows us to better assess and minimize hazards associated with environmental contamination, and to more accurately predict effects of environmental perturbations.
Jay earned her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California Los Angeles, with an appointment in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She specializes in the fate and transport of chemical and microbial contaminants in the environment. Her research addresses a wide range of topics including coastal water quality, heavy metals in the environment, environmental proliferation of antibiotic resistance, and the impacts of environmental education on the carbon footprint of dietary choices. She teaches classes in Aquatic Chemistry, Statistics, Chemical Fate and Transport, and Food: A Lens for Environment and Sustainability. She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, and two engineering school-wide awards for excellence in teaching. In addition, she was the Pritzker Fellow for Environmental Sustainability and a Carnegie Fellow for Civic Engagement in Higher Education. Jennifer also directs the Center for Environmental Research and Community Engagement (CERCE), a UCLA Center that addresses community-based environmental research questions in under-served communities in Los Angeles.
Education
B.S., (1991), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M.S., (1993), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D., (1999), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Selected Awards and Honors
- School-wide Lockheed Martin Award for Excellence in Teaching 2019
- National Water Research Institute Technical Advisory Panel (2012-present)
- SMMUSD Honorary Service Award for Outstanding Service to Children and Youth 2015
- Coordinator of science projects and poster sessions at UCLA for K-12 students 2003 – 2014
- Pritzker Fellow for Environmental Sustainability 2011 and 2012
- Northrop Grumman Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2007
- Carnegie Foundation Faculty Fellow for Service Learning for Political Engagement, 2007-2008
- Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), 2004
- NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, 2004-Present
- Fellow of Martin Society for Global Sustainability, 1999
- GE Graduate Research Fellowship, 1995
- Member of Chi Epsilon, 1991
- Parsons Fellowship, 1991
Marcia Hale is interested in resolving conflicts over natural resources and focuses on governance as a primary intervention. At CCSC, she conducts research on the Southern California urban water system, with particular emphasis on the institutional structure and issues of its governance. With a BA from UCLA in International Development and a Master’s in Urban Planning, she is currently a PhD candidate completing her dissertation research on the role urban water systems play in regional environmental security, especially in Southern California & the Middle East. Marcia worked for the Liberty Hill Foundation on environmental justice policy and for Sedona Magazine in business development. She is a practicing mediator specializing in restorative justice cases, as well as those concerned with identity and family conflicts.
Jen Molnar is a scientific leader in incorporating nature into human decisions at the corporate and policy level. She is managing director and lead scientist of The Nature Conservancy’s new Center for Sustainability Science. The Center is focused on enabling transformative change by filling science gaps that are inhibiting large-scale uptake and implementation of sustainability solutions via corporate practices and policy.
Jen’s current work focuses on achieving significant conservation outcomes through policy and corporate practices, including projects on sustainable agriculture and natural infrastructure. She is also the science lead for the TNC-Dow Chemical Company collaboration, demonstrating how a company can change its core decision-making to account for nature. This work has led to Dow’s ground-breaking ten-year Valuing Nature Goal – a commitment to consider nature in all of the Fortune 50 company’s capital, R&D, and real estate decisions by 2020, while aiming to generate $1B in business value from projects that are good for business and good for ecosystems.
Jen has over 15 years of experience in applying science to decisions that improve the state of the natural world and how people depend on it, including through research, global assessments, corporate practice innovations, and environmental remediation.
Jen received a master’s degree from Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and now serves as a board member of the Alumni Association. She has a B.S. in environmental engineering from Harvard and has previous experience in hydrology and environmental remediation.
Emma is a quantitative ecologist and data scientist interested in how we humans effect change in the food webs of which we are a part. She graduated in 2016 with a PhD from Princeton’s department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology where she studied patterns of commercial fishing along the US West Coast. Right now she spends most of her time using large, high-dimensional, unstructured data to derive novel insights for farmers as a data scientist at Granular.
Emma’s background has been working on applied natural resource problems (e.g. problems due to predators, livestock, fishing, and agricultural practices) by understanding the ecological and economic principles which underlie and perpetuate these issues. She thinks sitting at the intersection academic research and industry, of theory and practice, has tremendous potential to affect change in these difficult to manage coupled human-natural systems. She is excited to be doing so as a part of the advisory group at UCLA’s IoES.
Samantha works for Amazon Web Services as a Renewable Energy Infrastructure Manager (the opinions she gives here are her own). Samantha believes corporations have incredible potential to do good in the world. She is excited to participate in the Sustainability Advisory Group and further the conversation on practical public-private partnerships’ ability to accelerate the world towards a clean energy future. Emphasis on the practical.
Prior to Amazon, Samantha worked as a researcher for the Nature Conservancy. She holds an MBA from MIT Sloan and a BS in Biology from Yale.
Professor Elizabeth DeLoughrey has appointments in the English Department and the UCLA Institute for the Environment and Sustainability. She is the founder and coordinator of the UCLA Postcolonial Literature and Theory Colloquium and from 2015-2020 was co-editor for the interdisciplinary, transnational open access journal Environmental Humanities. Her scholarship has been supported by institutions such as the American Council for Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation, Mellon Foundation, UCLA Global Studies Program, Fulbright Scholars, UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Cornell University Society for the Humanities.
She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Literatures (2007), and co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture(2005); Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011); and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015). Her most recent book, Allegories of the Anthropocene, examines climate change and empire in the literary and visual arts and was published by Duke University Press in 2019.
Interests
Postcolonial and Indigenous approaches to the Environmental Humanities; Island Studies, Anthropocene and Climate Change, Militarization and Nuclearization, Critical Ocean Studies, Feminist & Critical Theory; Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures and Art
